Let's talk about a naked short
If I have 20 ounces of gold in my safe and decide to sell 20 ounces of gold in a short sale, that short is covered. It means worst comes to worst I can hand over my gold to cover that trade. But most gold and silver that is sold is sold naked, meaning the guy who is holding 1 ounce of gold sells 20 shorts against it. He can't deliver to all 20 if everyone demands their gold.
The gold and silver markets have more naked shorts than any market I ever saw as a stock broker. It is terrifying. This is what is happening right now with the gold and silver market. There are exchanges which cannot deliver gold and silver, they are using various excuses, but this is what is known as a short squeeze.
Now let's keep the numbers simple, suppose the Comex has 100 tons of silver and 70 tons have been removed as people want to hold the silver. If the price of silver goes up, say from $20 to $30 they can buy 50% more silver on margin (their silver is collateral for the loan). So whoever bought 70 tons can now buy the remaining 30 tons and the COMEX will have 0 tons of silver even though they have contracts to people who think they own 2,000 tons in total. This is what is known as a bank run. If you saw "It's a beautiful life" they nearly have a bank run in that movie that they are able to narrowly avert by using up all his own savings.
Front Running
This now brings us to the term "front running". Some who sees that we are about to have a short squeeze will buy up gold and silver and take possession so that when the squeeze takes place the price of gold and silver will spike and they will benefit. But who can take possession of millions of ounces of gold when gold is $3,000 an ounce? 1 million ounces is $3 billion, you have to have a really good bank vault to keep that much gold. That is what we are seeing, the Central banks, the major multinational banks, the Fed and the US government are front running. That is how you know there is going to be a short squeeze, because they are spending billions to position themselves to profit from this.
How the US can use a short squeeze to pay off debt
Now imagine you are BRICS and your currency is based on gold and now gold spikes 8x to $24,000 an ounce. That means any imports from those countries also goes up 8x in price. No one can afford that so the exports from the BRICS nations crash. As a result they must dump their gold on the market to buy up US dollars. Meanwhile whoever orchestrated the short squeeze can buy up the gold that is dumped at a discount. Few could pull this off, but the US is in a unique position to do it. Let's assume they own $1 trillion worth of gold. They squeeze the market, the price of that gold spikes to $8 trillion. If you sell it the price of gold will crash, but they can sell it to themselves, paying off $8 trillion of US bonds. This gold then crashes the market because they dump it at the market and there are not enough buyers to buy up $8 trillion worth of gold. Now the BRICS nations currency crashes with it, as gold might fall to $1,000 an ounce and as a result the BRICS nations cannot afford imports.
Meanwhile the US who just sold $8 trillion of gold when it was $24,000 an ounce can buy back the same gold at $1,000 an ounce. Squeeze again and now pay off another $8 trillion worth of US debt. Meanwhile everyone wants to buy US bonds because it is the only thing that is stable causing our interest rates to be very low. The US then buys up the gold the second time at less than $1,000 an ounce. So they pay off $16 trillion in debt and still have the same amount of gold spending 2% of what they made.
But this is not win/win. This will cause 50% of the world (the BRICS nations) to be destitute and broke, and many more people to be harmed significantly by that.