SILVER EAGLE SALES HIT NEW RECORD IN MARCH & LARGE COMEX SILVER WITHDRAWAL

According to the recent update by the U.S. Mint, Silver Eagle sales hit a new record in March. Sales of the U.S. Silver Eagle reached 4,476,000 at the end of the week. Even though this surpassed the amount sold last year by over one million, the U.S. mint still has one final update to take place on Monday, March 31st.

If sales of the Silver Eagle top 500,000 on the last reporting day, total sales in March could surpass 5 million and overtake January as the highest monthly total.

From the SRSRocco Report:

If sales of the Silver Eagle top 500,000 on the last reporting day, total sales in March could surpass 5 million and overtake January as the highest monthly amount.

This would put total sales for 2014 at 13.5 million down compared to the same period last year which reached 14.2 million. While this is a decline year over year, it was more due to allocated limits rather than a fall in demand.

The U.S. Mint didn’t begin selling the 2014′s until the end of the second week in January. Furthermore, the Authorized Dealers purchased every allocated Silver Eagle they could for the month. Which means they couldn’t acquire any more than the 4,775,000 shown in the table.

Even with this limitation, sales in 2014 are doing quite well as purchases in February and March were stronger than last year. Here are the comparisons:

FEB 2013 = 3,368,500

FEB 2014 = 3,750,000

MARCH 2013 = 3,356,500

MARCH 2014 = 4,476,000 (current)

Without including Monday’s update, 2014 Feb & Mar are up 1.5 million compared to 2013.

According to the U.S. Mint, total allocated Silver Eagles for this week were 1,416,500 which would have brought the total for the month to 4.7 million. This week, only 1,192,500 Silver Eagles were sold… which suggests the total allotment was not purchased be the Authorized Dealers.

It will be interesting to see how many Silver Eagles are sold this coming Monday and if demand remains strong in April.

The Comex has been slowly building silver inventories at its warehouse over the past several months. However, there was a large single 1.7 million oz withdrawal from Scotia Mocatta today knocking the total warehouse level below the 180 million oz level.

Lastly, some readers have brought it to my attention that the site has recently focused more on the so-called “Manipulation Theme”, rather than providing original information, facts and data on the energy, mining and precious metal industries.

I understand why some readers may feel this way. However, I do believe there is serious manipulation taking place in the markets… I just haven’t been able to express my views on this more constructively.

I see the manipulation not as an OVERT method (while it is highly possible at times), but rather a cause-and-effect due to herding the public into highly leveraged paper assets that have no future. I will explain this in more detail in the future.