Widespread Silver Bar Shortages

As of today, there are no longer any regular wholesale supplies of the 1 ounce through 100 ounce silver rounds and bars available for immediate delivery. It may be possible to locate incidental quantities of some product, but most wholesalers are now promising two to four weeks delivery to allow time for the silver to be fabricated.

As a result of the shortages, premiums have started to rise. So far, the increases have been modest, on the order of 0.5-2%. However, if the shortage grows, expect to see further and larger premium increases in the coming weeks. We could see a repeat of the late 2008 gold and silver buying frenzy, where product availability got as slow as 1-4 months after payment.

At the COMEX close yesterday, registered (dealer) silver inventories fell below 50 million ounces. Even if you include the eligible (investor) silver inventories in the COMEX bonded warehouses, which are not available to fulfill COMEX deliveries unless the investor specifically chooses to do so, there were barely 107 million ounces to fulfill around 725 million ounces of contractual obligations. COMEX silver inventories are now down more than 10% from mid-June even while the amount of silver owed has soared!

As the price of silver almost continuously rose from $17.98 on August 23 to $29.36 mid-day on November 9 (a 63% increase), the COMEX had not changed its minimum requirements for leveraged accounts. It would be a normal process to periodically bump us the minimum amounts for margin accounts as prices rise, but this was not done until November 9, when the margin requirement was increased from $5,000 per contract to $6,500.

On September 16, the COMEX further raised the silver contract margin requirement to $7,250—even though the price of silver had been dropping since November 9! What is suspicious is that a lot of “insiders” were liquidating their silver positions starting the afternoon of November 15. Is it possible that they may have received advance notice of the coming change in the minimum margin account requirement and sold in anticipation of lower prices the next day? (more)