As someone who has been actively trading silver for the past year, the real reason that silver plummeted is because:

1) the market was looking for an excuse and the new Fed chain nominee was as good a reason as anything.

2) The margin requirements on metal futures changed THIS MONTH. Instead of having daily limits, they changed the margin requirements for futures contracts in real-time throughout this move. Futures brokerages calculate margin requirements every second, so what happened was as silver dropped today, the margin requirements got more strict and then people were being liquidated out of their positions immediately. This caused the markets to crash the way we did all day.

Previously, what you would see are circuit breakers kick in and the contracts would stop trading for a certain amount of time. You never used to see down 30% days ever, because circuit breakers would limit is. You would see limit down days, and the contracts would stop trading for the rest of the day and then reopen the next day. In the 70s and 80s I think there was a time when some contracts would open at limit down for 15+ days in a row and wouldn't trade for the entire day and people were financially ruined because they couldn't get out of a position for weeks on end.

So finding an excuse to sell on top of forced liquidation is what you saw today. It's a classic volcano top and I think silver is going to drift lower for the rest of the year.