this is from ed steer of casey research, who notes that silver production at the huge base metal producer is down 24% from the previous quarter:

Ted Butler sent an interesting piece my way yesterday. It's the "BHP Billiton Production Report for the Nine Months Ended 31 March 2009" Like Ted, I was only interested in their silver production numbers...and this [in a nutshell] is what it said... year/year silver production...down 11% [3.8 million oz.]...but compared to the prior quarter [Dec Q'08], silver production was down a whopping 24%. You can check out their production data on all metals. Except for natural gas and diamonds, their production is down across the board in just about everything. It's the chart on Page 7 of this pdf file...and the link is here.

http://www.caseyresearch.com/display...