Avi Gilburt

I can provide one word of advice to you regarding the title of this article, which is the same advice that President Biden provided to Iran over a year ago:

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There was a lot of investor hand-wringing and head-scratching experienced this past week. On Wednesday night, NVDA announced its earnings. And, not only was its earnings exceptionally strong, beating Wall Street's expectations for both revenue and earnings per share, they also provided strong forward-looking guidance.

Over the past 12 months, we have published several articles arguing that past-due student loans are very likely to affect the entire retail credit industry. As a reminder, federal student loan payments were paused for 43 months starting in March 2020, pushing delinquencies below 1%. After repayments resumed in September 2023, a one-year "on-ramp" period prevented missed payments from affecting credit reports. That protection expired in October 2024. Since then, more than 17% of student loan borrowers have fallen at least 90 days past due on their payments at least once. As it takes 270 days of missed payments to enter federal student loan default, 4Q25 was the first quarter when new defaults began appearing on credit reports.

Some of you were quite upset with me after an interview I did with KITCO in December of 2025. In that interview, I noted that metals were entering the final segment of their parabolic blow-off rallies and 2026 will likely usher in a sizeable correction.

With this article, we are introducing a new series we intend on writing for the foreseeable future. For those of you that have been following our public banking articles, you would know that we have been highlighting the major existential issues that are found on many bank balance sheets today.

Over the past twelve months, the Fed and other regulators have published multiple pieces highlighting major risks to the banking system - often in sharp contrast to what bank CEOs and large-banks analysts are saying.

In this series, we focus on the existential issues found on one specific bank’s balance sheet.

With the continued strength in the metals complex, it has to make us strongly consider that the bottom is already in place. So, let's discuss it.

With this report, we continue the “Don’t Bank On It” format: a concentrated review of the existential risks sitting on one bank’s balance sheet. We also ch