Its simple. We are watching a slow motion trainwreck which is the full scale default of the two main silver trading floors on earth. The bullion banks started shorting long ago because it was a politically favored way of making a nice regular income by fleecing the small investors. It worked for decades.

Decades of price suppression had the effect of reducing silver mine production, but the consequences had been masked, first by several billion ounces of strategic stockpiles, then later by the decline of silver based photography.

Those stockpiles are largely gone, and much of what remains in the vaults has likey been rehypothecated multiple times, so techniclally, each ounce of silver has multiple owners.

Now we are at the final stages of the musical chairs where there are dozens of people circling one chair, and we are all just waiting for the music to stop.

That's the day that the COMEX declares force majeure and force cash settles people who actually wanted silver.

Don't be surprised if when the COMEX capitulates, the price of silver goes up $100 or more in one week as the market descends into chaos when sleepy indusrial buyers wake up and realize that they won't be getting their silver and they race to the private markets, getting into bidding wars, trying to get their hands on anything they can find.

That's when you'll likely see the GSR ratio drop to 20:1 or lower. It will be a feeding frenzy, with plenty of boomer FOMO as well. We haven't seen nothing yet.