Loading ...This year some 900,000 oz of silver on average have moved into or out from these six warehouses on a daily basis.
The daily average movement of silver into and out from the COMEX silver warehouses at 900,000 oz is equal to 28% of total world daily mine production.” -Ted Butler
Over 1 in every 4 ounces of silver that planet earth will bring out of the ground this year, will be shuffled through the vast halls of Comex warehouses. Over 1 in 4. The Comex system has gone from moving perhaps 1 million ounces of silver per week, to moving nearly 1 million ounces…per day! In fact, in just the last two business days, the Comex has moved over a whopping 4 million ounces of silver!
As prices continue their descent for both gold and silver, it’s more important than ever to keep a clear focus on the implications of this price action, not just for investors like us(which are obvious), but also for those trying to orchestrate it. It’s all a game of ounces in the end, for these banks, after all. They must bring enough physical metal to deliver on their exchanges, both to investors, and to the industrial users. There’s no “Plan B”.
Since both sources of demand won’t back off from their record level purchases, the bullion banks realize that they simply have to bring even more product to market. Their backs are against the wall here. The moment the metal is not delivered to some large customer in size, is the precise moment the end to this game will begin. That’s the Catch 22 of the situation though: the banks want lower silver prices, yet the lower the price goes, the more threatened their constant source of supply becomes.
We’ve already seen how miners are hitting a wall, concerning the silver supply they can bring to market at these prices. Yet, other sources are quite sensitive to price drops as well, some of which the average silver investor may not even know about.
Scrap it!
Sources like silver “scrap” and recycling are particularly vulnerable in this respect. In fact, last year alone, the amount of silver that was produced due to recycling dropped by an enormous 60 million ounces, a drop of over 23% from the previous year. Via the Silver Institute below, you can see just how large this drop was. It was such an immediate difference, that it became one of the chief reasons for last year’s deficit. read more