Precious Metals Default Scenarios

For obvious reasons, there has been a great deal of discussion about actual, formal “defaults” in the gold and silver markets. Among those “obvious reasons” is that informal defaults are apparently already taking place in both markets.

Beginning in the London gold market over a year ago, and now rumored to be occurring in New York's “Comex” silver futures market, buyers who have legally contracted to take “physical delivery” of the metals they have purchased are said to be accepting large, paper bribes to accept a “cash settlement” instead.

There are many reasons for investors to take such “rumors” seriously. Empirically, we see the premiums being charged for physical bullion (even from large, established dealers) rising to levels never before seen (around the world). This strongly suggests a very tight market for bullion. This is confirmed through the anecdotal reports of both industrial users and large institutional investors (such as Sprott Asset Management) that they are having a great deal of difficulty locating any large quantities of bullion available for sale.

In theoretical terms, we are merely seeing the culmination of arrogant bankers attempting to defy the elementary laws of supply and demand for over a quarter of a century. Even those with no training in economics know the basic rule (since it is merely an expression of common sense): when prices rise, demand falls; when prices fall, demand rises.

There are many derivative principles which flow from this one basic law. Among the most salient (and the one apparently beyond the comprehension of bankers) is that if you under-price any good it will be over-consumed. I have demonstrated the unequivocal truth of this principle previously, and so will not do so again. Suffice it to say that in deliberately under-pricing gold and silver for well over a quarter of a century (through their relentless manipulation of these markets), the bankers have caused more than 25 years of excessive demand – where previous surpluses in these markets have been transformed into huge supply-deficits.

In the gold market, where virtually all of the bullion ever produced has been conserved, this distortion of markets has merely resulted in a massive transfer of bullion: out of the vaults of the West and into the vaults of the East. The situation in the silver market is entirely different.

Being both much cheaper than gold, and possessing even more superior chemical and metallurgical properties, silver was written off by those with no understanding of precious metals as merely an “industrial” commodity. As a matter of common sense, the rapid increase in industrial demand for silver must make it more “precious” rather than less so.

Illustrating this elementary logic, the combination of gross under-pricing and surging industrial demand has served to decimate global silver stockpiles and inventories. Noted silver researcher Ted Butler has estimated that global stockpiles of silver plummeted from over 6 billion ounces (fifty years ago) to approximately 1 billion ounces today. Silver is literally six times “more precious” today than it was a half-century earlier. In terms of “inventories” (the amount of silver actually available for sale today), the destruction caused by the bankers is even more apparent.

Between 1990 and 2005, global silver inventories plummeted by roughly 90%: from over 2 billion ounces to little more than 200,000 ounces. Since 2005, there has been a massive inventory-sham perpetrated by the bankers and the quasi-official “keeper of records” for the gold and silver sector: GFMS and the CPM Group. Through the farcical practice of adding the paper-bullion of silver “bullion-ETF's” to inventories and pretending this represents “new silver”, inventories have magically “risen” by roughly 400% since then – despite the seemingly incongruous facts that silver demand has increased dramatically, while supply has remained flat.

In fact, any bullion actually held in a bullion-ETF cannot be an “inventory”, since it fails to satisfy the basic definition: it is not for sale, but rather is privately held by the unit-holders of these funds. How can the holders of such funds sleep at night, knowing that the legal “custodian” of their bullion is telling the world that their silver is “for sale”?