The demand for gold per year has been around 4400 tonnes per year with mining production at around 2500 tonnes on average. The 1900 tonnes of gold has been made up through the leasing of gold by the bankers. These numbers are at best a guess but it should be pretty close to this. We believe that the leasing of gold has decimated all of central bank gold. They started in 1988 with 30,000 tonnes (excluding the 3000 tonnes of IMF gold). At best 12,000 tonnes remain. At worst, only 5-6000 remain and this is with China and Russia. In silver, the demand for silver has been 800-900 million oz per year with a supply from the mines at 500-600 million oz. Scrap silver has been around 170 million oz and thus the remaining silver had to be made up with supplies from above ground. The usa had 2 billion oz in 1990 and today it has zero. It is believed that China is the supplier of that silver to the tune of 600 million ozs or so. I hope that this gives you a better understanding of the total short positions and what it means. I tried to simplify things without going into the derivative calculations.