this is from ed steer's commentary on the availability of physical silver. i would also note that the mint did not start striking 2010 silver eagles until november, which is a very late start, given that in the past the mint always started the next year's production in july. so i expect the mint will have a very difficult time keeping up with demand for the 2010 silver eagles.

We'll, we're getting down to the closing deliveries days in January. The CME's Daily Delivery Notice shows that 62 gold and 2 whole silver contracts were put up for delivery on Wednesday. Neither GLD or SLV showed any changes yesterday... and there's not much to report from Switzerland's Zürcher Kantonalbank, either. For the week that was, they reported that their gold ETF had a withdrawal of 19,656 troy ounces... and their silver ETF was down 31,669 troy ounces. [Thanks Carl] The U.S. Mint had another update yesterday. One-ounce gold eagle sales were up another 4,000 to 85,000 for the month so far... but silver eagles sales soared another 502,000 to 3,592,500 for the month of January so far! This is a new high record for monthly silver eagle sales... and represents very close to 10% of the United States yearly silver output! The Mint still has another four reporting days left in the month... and who knows, maybe they'll break the four million mark. Watch this space! And lastly, the Comex-approved depositories reported that 418,461 ounces of silver were withdrawn last Friday.

While still on the subject of silver eagles, I found the story below posted over at Kitco on Sunday night. The headline [from coinnews.net] reads "US Mint Silver Eagle Sales Top 3 Million, Best Ever January". That story was obviously written before Monday's big update. But it's a very interesting story which gives a lot of insight into the U.S. Mint's production schedule... and the graph is well worth noting. So I urge you to run through it... and the link is here.

http://www.caseyresearch.com/displayGsd.php