From Ed Steer this morning.

In a nutshell... here it is for silver. '3 or less' U.S. bullion banks increased their net short position in Comex silver by 5,637 contracts from the August report to the September report. Without doubt, JPMorgan was the culprit. The '8 or more' Non U.S. banks that hold Comex silver contracts were exactly market neutral... holding the same number of longs as shorts. However, this is a deterioration from the August report... as that report showed that foreign banks were net long 1,015 Comex contracts.

In gold, four U.S. banks were net short 109,826 Comex contracts in the September report. This is an increase in net short position of around 11,400 Comex contracts since the August report. The thirteen Non U.S. banks were net short 20,586 Comex contracts. This is also a big deterioration since the August report... as the August report showed that these same 13 Non U.S. banks were only net short 9,317 Comex contracts.

From the August report to the September report, these bullion banks [U.S. and foreign] have increased their total net Comex short positions by 6,652 contracts in silver and 29,903 contracts in gold.

And, without a doubt, a lot of the short position increase by the U.S. bullion banks was put on by JPMorgan. This especially applies to silver where, without doubt, they put on the lion's share of the 5,637 Comex short position increase that was reported by the '3 or less' U.S. bullion banks.

In a report to private clients yesterday, Ted Butler had this to say... "Here's why I think JPMorgan shorted more, putting its head back into the lion's mouth, after closing out a bunch of silver short positions. I don't think they thought they had any other choice. On August 24th, the price of silver was around $18 the ounce. Over the next couple of days it jumped sharply to $19... and then continued to move up from there. The technical funds were buying aggressively and the Commercials [as a group] sold to them. Without JPMorgan's additional 5,000 or 6,000 or more short contracts, the Commercials stood a good chance of being over run to the upside. I'm sure JPMorgan was afraid of this and helped out their collusive commercial brother crooks. I'm also sure that without JPMorgan's pile-on, the price of silver would have exploded upward." I