According to Ted Butler, who seems to have been right on quite a few counts, silver has been held down artificially in price for decades. Long contracts probably taken out in Asia (where the massive shorting activity takes place, as London takes a holiday, like this weekend), are often backed up by manufacturers with short contracts which are there to manage the effect of price adjustments over the length of supply contracts. When there is an overload of short contracts, it has the effect of supply of a diminishing resource marching out of the gates at a vastly reduced price level.

I've read reports suggesting that as oil is reaching or may have already reached optimum supply levels, silver could start running out in as little as 10 years away. That's because of the increasing use of silver in technology, it is used extensively in electronics as it's a conductor of electricity, and also used in medical products as an antibacterial agent. I think there's a long list of uses on UC's web site, under why gold and silver.

Also remember Comex is a paper market, it isn't the same as the metals market in London, and one of the reasons why the silver price has rocketed is because people want to buy silver coins and can't get hold of them. Nothing has changed.

This weekend we've had a bank holiday in the UK on Friday because of the wedding and another today, so we've had low volume trading while Asia has been trying to sell silver again, but back to normal tomorrow.