This is current data from Dave Kranzler and his website: http://InvestmentResearchDynamics.com "...as of Friday the Comex is reporting 949k ozs of gold in the registered accounts of the Comex vaults and 9 million ozs of total gold. Yet, the open interest in paper gold contracts as of Friday totaled 41.7 million ozs. This is 44x more paper gold than the amount of physical that has been designated – “registered” – as available for delivery. It’s 4.6x more than the total amount of gold sitting on Comex vaults. With silver the situation is even more extreme. The Comex is reporting 29.5 million ozs of silver as registered and 190.2 million total ozs. Yet, the open interest in paper silver is a staggering 1.08 billion ozs. 1.08 billion ozs of silver is more silver than the world mines in a year. The paper silver open interest is 5x greater than the total amount of silver held in Comex vaults; it’s an astonishing 37x more than the amount of silver that is available to be delivered. This degree of imbalance between the open interest in CME futures contracts in relation to the amount of the underlying physical commodity represented by those contracts never occurs in any other CME commodity – ever. Historically, when the amount of paper exceeds the amount of underlying commodity that is available for delivery by more than 20-30%, the CFTC intervenes by investigating the possibility of market manipulation. But never with gold and silver." Sorry about the underlining, I can't get rid of it.
So what is new? The extent of the oversell in paper is always this extreme and it has been like this for years. Only the numbers change.
What stands out to me isn't the ratios, those are actually lower than expected, but the actual amount available. 29.5 MOz of silver is only about 2 weeks of global mining supply. It looks like the COMEX is on borrowed time, probably why the CME stepped down from the LBMA. They know they won't be able to deliver for much longer unless they start buying which would drive up the price.
