The Rising Influence of Rising Affluence

[OakesCS]

Forward sales of silver through the LBMA OTC London market are approximately 8.5 Billion ozs. This is almost all the entire global reserves of silver that are yet to be mined!

What are the delivery dates on those sales?

if that number is correct and the delivery dates are in the next year or 5, then somebody is going to get hurt. 8.5e9 oz = 264380 tonnes. Total world Ag production, which includes recycled Ag as well as mine production, was 21,400 tonne in 2009 and 21300 tonne in 2008. The 264 ktonne number is more Ag than has been produced over the last 15 yrs.

I have no doubt that the reserve base could be expanded to accomodate the quantity but it would take years to actually obtain the Ag and, of course, the price would have to increase substantially and be sustained. I suspect that bankruptcies would precede any of the latter occurrences.

http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/silver/
http://minerals.usgs.gov/ds/2005/140/silver.pdf
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/silver/mcs-2010-silve.pdf

just as an indication of the current state of affairs of Ag mining in Mexico, which is #3 in world Ag production but was #1 or #2 until recently, closed mines have become a preferred dumping ground for murder victims related to the illicit drug industry.