Gold got whacked last week… and then shrugged it off.

As I'm writing this, gold is clawing back toward $5,000, silver is back around $85, and Washington is suddenly acting like it just discovered the periodic table.

On the one hand, Trump just announced Project Vault—a $12 billion effort to build a strategic stockpile of critical minerals. On the other hand, there's talk of expanding Ex-Im Bank's lending capacity by another $70 billion—the kind of "national priority" financing that turns obscure commodities into headline trades overnight.