"The USDollar ship of sea is adrift, soon a derelict vessel. The signs are clear. The sovereign debt system that serves as foundation is a rotting corpse. The East is working feverishly to build the alternative system. Look for barter to be its backbone. By the Ides of March, it should be more clear. Any controlled demolition of PIIGS debt and bond writedowns will make for quite the event to watch. The upcoming funding needs of Italy are an order of magnitude greater than the bond market or the Euro Central Bank can manage. The game breaker events are nigh. Just this week, India and Iran announced settlement of oil trade in gold bullion. The workaround seems unique and novel, but with historical precedent. Before the USGovt unilaterally broke the Bretton Woods Accord that established the Dollar Gold Standard, settlement in gold was the norm. The world might be soon coming full circle.

The US-based silver production in October 2011 was 30% below the same month in 2010. It went from 117 metric tons to 81.4 metric tons. In contrast, the American Eagle silver coin production is on a strong upward course since 2007. The current US silver demand is 117% of the current domestic production level, in deficit. The USMint will have to import silver. They can always shut down, or impose a vacation, or ship steel coins clad in silver. If it works for tungsten and gold, it might work for steel and silver. Be sure to know that like with gold, the newly assembled Eastern team is at work in the silver market. Their objective is to cause a failure in the cartel attempts to deploy naked shorting in price suppression, to force them to cover their huge short positions in retreat, to oblige outsized drainage of the COMEX, to even induce them into draining the SLV exchange traded fund of its inventory from the backdoor. The method is simple, coming from illicit (but not illegal) shorting of the shares.