/biz/ - Business & Finance

>>50297430
I also say "car" instead of the complete make model and year of my 4 wheeled, ICE powered personal transport vehicle, because I generally don't interact with aspies that physically cannot into context.

>>22312985
That's a can of worms, but basically, when Lehman Bros failed in the aftermath of 2008 JPM inherited a lot of their positions, one of which was a massive short position on silver futures contracts. These contracts are traded in the US on the COMEX. Now in a lot of futures markets plenty of people buy futures never intending to take delivery of the wheat or pork bellies, but to sell it later and make a profit. However, in the silver (and also the gold) ETF markets, the overwhelming majority of contracts were never 'cashed out' and the metal was never turned over to someone. Instead a lot of the contracts simply get rolled over so they can continue to be traded. Due to 'fractional lending' and 'non-allocated bullion' shenanigans there are are about 180 'paper ounces' of silver traded for every 1 ounce that exists in vault storage. Additionally, the custodians of SLV and GLD (JPM and HSBC respectively) are allowed to break the COMEX's rules about owning fuck tons of shares in the markets they are supposed to be overseeing.

For a long time, JPM was allowed to use their huge market share to essentially make the prices; slamming it down to buy cheap (or even just willing more contracts into existence, because who's gonna catch them if they're the custodian?) and selling high. They were also able to accumulate a large amount of the physical metal for their own vaults this way at a discount. This worked fine until recently when suddenly the spot price of silver hit $13 but physical metal was $30. Suddenly there was an obvious opportunity to demand delivery on COMEX if you had a contract and sell it immediately for a profit. JPM lost millions of dollars in silver out of their house COMEX account until they had to let the price rise to ~$25 to stop the arbitrage bleeding. Latest news is the some are still demanding delivery of the metal instead of rolling contracts, and COMEX is taking CHINESE 'silver' to meet demand now, so they are desperate for metal.