alt Hacker NewsTrue, but 30% is a pretty dramatic change for one day. If you look at the history of the silver price - go back as far as you like - you won't find many days when it moves 30% in either direction.
Is it the beginning of a longer-term down? I have no idea.
It reminds me of my days looking at biotech stocks. You'd have a small company stake their whole financial future on the outcome of a clinical trial, to know whether their drug works or not. Leading up to the release of the results, the price would veer this way or that based on tidbits cleaned from doctors involved in the trials or whatever, but the stock would mostly be in a superposition of the two universes, one where it succeeds and one where it fails (or more mundanely: the probability weighted average of the price that the stock would be in each one). Then the results would come out and the universes would collapse to the "works" or "doesn't work" one and the stock would jump 30% or crater 50% or whatever.
I haven't been following this gold and silver saga, but it feels like a similar situation where there were two possible Fed appointees who would have vastly different impacts on the price of the metals. Then the announcement comes and the price found the world where that was the nominee and not the other guy.