this comes from james turk, of goldmoney.com:

A Fabrication Bottleneck or Something More

The Internet is abuzz with reports that precious metal dealers have stopped selling coins and small bars because they have run out of inventory.

For example, Franklin Sanders reports on goldprice.org that his inability to purchase product from his suppliers is something that he has never seen before in his "twenty-eight years of brokering silver and gold." On Friday afternoon, Kitco posted the following notice: "Due to market volatility and higher demand in the entire industry, we are anticipating delays in supply of all bullion products."

The rush out of fiat currency and into precious metals on this latest drop in prices is not just a North American phenomenon. The Times of India reports: "There is a shortage of the yellow metal in the bullion banks and traders."

The bottom line is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to buy coins and small bars. Mints and refiners are back-ordered. Dealer shelves are bare. But the question is, why? Is it just a fabrication bottleneck, or is something else happening?

When I see or hear that store "shelves are bare", my first reaction is that government price controls have been imposed. Price controls always create shortages. But there are no price controls on the precious metals - at least not yet anyway. So absent price controls, the answer to dealer shortages is simply that the price of gold and silver is just too cheap.

To explain this point, there are two different gold markets - the physical market where real bullion is exchanged between hands. And the paper market, where people buy and sell pieces of paper purportedly backed by gold, much of which is highly leveraged. The selling carnage in the paper market from over-leveraged hedge funds has created a buying frenzy by retail investors for fabricated product in the physical market, with many dealers reporting that they have sold out and cannot get their hands on coins and small bars, particularly silver.

In other words, there is presently a huge disconnect between the paper market and the physical market. The demand for physical metal is soaring.

Normally the market is supplied by new material being fabricated and existing products being sold back into the market, but no old products are being sold. In contrast to the paper market where over-leveraged positions have caused distressed and forced selling, existing fabricated product is in strong hands, and unlikely to be dislodged except at much higher prices.

I suspect that this disconnect between the paper market and the physical market means that gold will climb back as rapidly as it fell, creating a "V" bottom. Consequently, the precious metals are likely to snap back as rapidly as they dropped. After all, inflation is a growing problem everywhere, the US federal deficit is ballooning, the global banking system is imploding from losses, inflation-adjusted interest rates in every major currency remain negative, and the euro is reeling because of massive current account gaps in Spain, Portugal and Greece. All of these factors are very gold bullish.

To give you a true picture of just how bad inflation has become, here is what John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics reports in his latest newsletter: "The SGS-Alternate Consumer Inflation Measure, which reverses gimmicked changes to official CPI reporting methodologies back to 1980, rose to a 28-year high of roughly 13.4% in July, up from 12.6% in June." It's no wonder that the demand for precious metal coins and small bars is so strong.

http://goldmoney.com/en/commentary.p...