Comments by Rob Rinear from Saturday's International Forecaster;

"As of Friday, the Commercial net short position in silver increased by another 2,352 contracts, or 11.8 million ounces. The Commercial net short position now stands at 236.4 million ounces of silver. Now, we like to look at them ranked by their particular "size" starting with the big 4 major institutions, then the 5 -8 smaller players and the balance which includes such things as hedge funds.

It seems that JPM the biggest of the "big 4" went short another 1000 contracts, while the others added about 400+ to that. The 5-8 junior players increased their short position by about 700 contracts. This was just the recent COT report folks, so you have to put this into context. While we can talk about futures contracts, most people function more along the lines of "ounces of metal". So how’s that work out?

With JP Morgan's increased position, they are short a whopping 27,000 Comex silver contracts. What's that mean? It means they are short over 135,000,000 ounces of silver. That's about 28% of the entire Silver futures market on the Comex. That's just ONE player. But JPM doesn't act alone in this cabal, so we have to look into the other players. Going into last weeks cut off on Tuesday, the top eight players via size are short 262,100,000 ounces of silver.

Now although that number is completely outstanding on its own, many may wonder just how significant it is. I mean...if the entire market is five hundred billion ounces, then these 8 players shorting 260 million is not terribly egregious. Well, sorry. As a percentage of the entire Comex futures market in silver, the four majors are short 44% of the entire market. Add the 4 smaller firms and we add another 9% to the equation. Added up, just 8 firms are short a colossal 53% of the entire Comex silver market. Of that, JPM by itself holds half the position.

The regulators don't seem to think that this is any indication that they're influencing the pricing of silver. In what can only be described as the fox guarding the hen house, they apparently don't see any trouble despite just 4 players being short almost one half of the entire market. According to them, there's no collusion between them, no "ganging up", no backdoor deals. Yeah right. You bet.

Granted I'm harping on silver here, since I believe it has been manipulated more than any other metal ( or commodity at all for that matter) but lets not forget gold. In percentage terms on a 'net' basis, the top 4 firms are short 29.4% of the entire Comex futures market in gold...and the '5 through 8' players are short an additional 12.7 percentage points. So if we total this up, what do we find? In a market as large and global as gold, just 8 firms are short 42% of the entire Comex gold futures market. Again the regulators wave us by, "nothing to see here folks keep on going".

Do you all get it? One would think that when you call your metals dealer and he charges you 30 dollars for your ounce of silver, that's the price that was discovered by untold millions of investors buying and selling in the open market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The price is set by the paper market, between the long futures and the shorts, and over and over we can prove conclusively that the shorts are only there to keep the prices down. Who knows where the true price of silver would be if these shorts were removed? 200? 500?

One may wonder why they got so aggressive this past week. The answer is pretty simple. While they’re always beating silver and gold, suppressing the price, this week they had to really try and put the brakes on it. Why? Because Helicopter Ben Bernanke just told us he’s printing an extra 40 billion a month for “ever”, and that means the dollar gets weak and the metals roar higher. They had to try their best to stop gold from entering hyperdrive and silver from breaking to new highs. Nothing bugs central bankers more than seeing “true money” in the form of gold and silver soar higher because of their ignorant monetary policy. Yes, they picked up the pace for this occasion folks. They didn’t want more and more people selling dollars and buying gold"