this article by gene arensberg highlights the concentrated short position. as large as the gold position is, the concentrated silver position is even worse. two banks are short almost 99% of the the total commercial short position. but the cftc can't find any evidence of manipulation.

Silver

For silver, it’s even more startling. On December 2, as silver closed at $9.57, exactly 2 U.S. banks held a net short positioning of 24,555 contracts. The CFTC reports that as of the same date all traders classed as commercial held a net short positioning of 24,894 contracts. So, the 2 U.S. banks, with one particular Fed member bank probably holding almost all of it, held a sickening 98.64% of all the collective commercial net short positioning on the COMEX, division of NYMEX in New York.

Here’s what the miscreant banks’ positioning looks like on a graph:

Source CFTC for Bank Participation, Cash Market for silver.

Exactly two U.S. banks have practically all the COMEX commercial net short positioning on silver. For a little context, 24,555 net short contracts means that the two banks held net short positions on December 2 for 122,775,000 ounces of silver with silver at $9.57. The COMEX said on December 4, that there were 80,239,857 ounces total in the “Registered” category, so these 2 malefactor banks held net short positioning equal to about 153% of the amount of deliverable silver in ALL the COMEX members’ accounts.

And people wonder why both silver and gold moved into backwardation over the past two or three weeks? People are apparently worried that they won’t be able to take delivery of gold or silver metal from the COMEX in the future. They'll pay a premium now to get it now.

How is it possible that the CFTC and the SEC continues to look the other way as a couple big Fed member banks continue to overwhelm the market with the weight of their own trading?

http://www.resourceinvestor.com/pebb...