Mornin to you, Scruff,

Ah ha! So that's how they do it. Should have known that with other people's money any risk is no risk to them. And in this market, it does seem a risky tactic for sure.

I just read over at ZEAL that as recently as July of this year "the S&P 500 index housed 220 individual companies that had market caps in excess of the entire contingent of silver stocks." And I've noted elsewhere that a quarter of the market cap of Coca Cola is larger than that of all the silver stocks. I think even Yahoo is bigger.

So it's easy to imagine how easy it must be, or at least have been, to manipulate the silver market in general and some emerging silver stock like ECU in specific.

Wondering about shorts, could be that JPMorgan never thought even for a second that they couldn't control forever the price of such a dinky little market by shorting everything coming down the pike while laughing up their sleeves. Bust up the other side any time they wanted. Sort of like having their own ATM machine.

I imagine there might be a lot of finger pointing one of these days trying to figure out who thought up this shorting strategy, 'cause it may be unraveling right in front of their eyes. Probably end up with a bunch of guys walking the plank, guilty of not.

Then again, if JPMorgan had to cover all their silver shorts, it probably wouldn't amount to a quarter's profit. Big deal. I think Ed Steer mentioned something like that the other day in reference to their gold market shorts .That might be their backstop position, if they get forced to the wall. Not much pain at all. Hardly affect their bonuses. And that would be the real shame.