"Where in the world does SLV (as well as GLD) buy their metal?" Excellent question hobbers!

We are talking about more silver than the Hunts tried to buy when there were billions of ounces of above ground supply.

COMEX only has about 125 million ounces of silver total for both registered and elibible.

A million ounces of pm is just over 30 tonnes. That would make about 250 million oz of silver in the one ETF.

Even if they published the weight and serial number of each bar I would not believe that they are not encumbered or double (or more ) counted!

Here is a quote from Gene Arensberg: "We can observe that even while investors are flooding into the big silver ETF there continues to be a lack of speculative buying activity in the COMEX silver market. For evidence look no farther than the pathetically low total open interest this past COT week of less than 87,000 contracts. As recently as August of last year, the COMEX open interest for silver was 140,000 contracts."

There is absolute evidence of a shift of silver investing away from physical AND futures to the ETF's. This is clear evidence of a lack of credibility in the CRIMEX. We know that over 95% of all CRIMEX shorts are now held by two US banks. We also know that the US banks are in serious trouble and their future must surely lack the trust they were granted just a few short months ago.

The ETF's are just too convenient a vehicle that absorbs huge investor demand in an environment of shrinking silver supply. This investor’s opinion is that the ETFs are too big a target for lent, leased, swapped, silver.

In this environment of opaque dealings, dark transactions, Pro-Forma financial statements, multi-layer storage and insufficient accounting practices we really have no reason to believe the integrity of advertised inventories of CRIMEX or the ETFs.
If wisdom would have us “trust, but verify”, it is nearly impossible for the average investor to verify. Worse is the fact that our government regulatory agencies have historically aided the practices of unscrupulous operators.