In silver the open interest is 5,428 contracts. This is 27.1mm ounces vs. the 48mm ounces available to deliver. This is 56% of deliverable silver. Again, if even half of the contracts demand delivery, the Comex will feel stress and the price of silver should squeeze higher.

Just for the record, many of us believe that the Comex is fraudulently reporting its actual amount of physical inventory in gold/silver. Ted Butler has pointed out that SLV had a 6 million ounce withdrawal of silver last week and is speculating that this silver may be possibly intended to help cover silver deliveries on the Comex. JP Morgan, not coincidentally, is the custodian (safekeeper) of the silver in SLV and just happens to be the largest short interest in paper silver on the planet, both via Comex futures and OTC derivatives. You can make your own assumptions there. It also just so happens that only 56 delivery notices were posted in silver yesterday - about 1% of the open interest - compared to gold notices which totalled 5,016 - about 33% of the open gold interest.

Again, the banks who are on the hook for deliveries have until the end of December to deliver. Typically most of the deliveries occur early in the delivery period. There's really not any good reason to not deliver the goods as soon as possible - that is, unless you don't have it in hand. I will point out that our fund, twice in the past 18 months, did not receive our silver delivery until well after the contractual delivery period. HSBC was the counterparty both times. I have received emails from readers over the past year describing the same experience. I think we can all see what is going on here and I believe it's part of the reason the metals are flying today.