Craig Hemke | Thursday, November 16th
With total Comex silver open interest near the 200,000 contract level, we thought it would be enlightening to once again discuss the total volume of physical mine supply versus digital metal supply on this futures exchange.
We've written on countless occasions about Comex alchemy and the fraud of digital metal. As a refresher, you might review both of these links before we continue:
• https://www.sprottmoney.com/Blog/42-years-of-fract...
• https://www.tfmetalsreport.com/blog/8252/econ-101-...
Today, we just thought we should remind you of the scale and scope of the fraud, particularly as it relates to silver. Again, under this current fractional reserve and derivative pricing scheme, price is "discovered" through the trading of derivative contracts, the supply of which is controlled by The Bullion Banks. These same banks are then responsible for managing and delivering physical metal at the digitally-derived price.
Currently, the total open interest (supply of contracts) in Comex silver is 199,899. For the sake of simplicity, let's round up and call it 200,000. At 5,000 ounces per contract, this represents 1,000,000,000 ounces of digital silver. That's a lot...especially when you consider that Keith Neumeyer told us last week that the world is on pace to mine about 800,000,000 ounces in 2017.
If we divide 1,000,000,000 digital ounces by 800,000,000 ounces of annual production, we find that total Comex silver open interest represents 125% of global mine supply. Is this a lot? Is this extreme? Is this evidence of a gross distortion of the price discovery process? Perhaps we should consider some of the other "metals" traded on Comex for perspective.
Let's start with Comex gold. How does Comex open interest compare? Well, the world is projected to mine about 2,800 metric tonnes this year or about 90,000,000 ounces of gold. With each Comex contract representing 100 ounces, the current total OI of 533,054 contracts equals 53,305,400 ounces or about 59% of total mine supply.
http://silverseek.com/article/compar...l-metals-16957