The total size of the precious metals market is just not that big and the same goes for the supply. That is one basic reason we went off the gold standard - our money supply needs were just too big. Precious metals today are fundamentally industrial commodities. Otherwise, it's a psychological hedge against devaluing currency. Shorts do the world a service. They are the carrion eaters of capitalism. They can't eat carrion until it's already dead.

A better way to look at the whole situation is this:

Value is created by productive work in the context of reasonable demand, thus the economy is well modeled by a leaky balloon. The rate of work going drives a rate of value creation. That is countered by the rate of decay of the value created, which can be thought of as entropy.

In the current economy we have some serious basic issues aside from structural finance problems. The most basic is that the baby boomers have been driving a high rate of value creation, but the leading edge of the boomers are reaching retirement age. Unfortunately for us, retirement is a non-value creation activity. It consumes value, but creates nothing. As the number of non-productive value consumers swell, the rate of value creation going into the economy drops. That slows growth and can reverse it.

Since, in a capitalist society, we depend on the valuation of the work engine (corporations) by the marginal dollar buys, as soon as the money going into our financial markets needs to go out more than it needs to go in - big problems.

Fundamentally, there are only three ways to solve this problem.

A. Non-boomers can become 3 times as productive. But in a system dominated by tight energy supplies that is impossible. It won't happen.

B. Boomers can be gotten rid of. This requires ending their lives in something like Kurt Vonnegut's "Suicide Parlors", making it very attractive and fun. This also isn't going to happen.

C. Boomers can stay in the workforce and forget about retiring. For most, this is possible, if unpleasant. The tough part is going to be keeping boomers motivated to be productive in their peak value occupations, or to retool for other high value occupations.

Aside from that? We are in for a long, tough sled.