While no additional silver was put on deposit at the Comex during the [past] week, The Banks sold contracts for 120MM oz.  This is fraud.  -@TF MetalsReport

If you were to poll the public about comparing the investment returns  between gold, silver and stocks during the first quarter of 2017, it’s highly probable that the majority of the populace would respond that the S&P 500 outperformed the precious metals.   That’s a result of the mainstream media’s unwillingness to report on the precious metals market other than to disparage it as an investment.

In reality, among silver, gold, the Nasdaq 100 and the S&P 500, the S&P 500 had the lowest ROR in Q1.  Silver led the pack at 14%, followed by tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 at 11.1%, gold at 8.6% and the S&P 500 at 4.8%.  Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Cramer.  Imagine the performance gold and silver would have turned in if the Comex was prevented from creating paper gold and silver in amounts that exceeded the quantity of gold and silver sitting in the Comex vaults.

As an example, as of Friday the Comex is reporting 949k ozs of gold in the registered accounts of the Comex vaults and 9 million ozs of total gold.  Yet, the open interest in paper gold contracts as of Friday totaled 41.7 million ozs.  This is 44x more paper gold than the amount of physical that has been designated – “registered” – as available for delivery.  It’s 4.6x more than the total amount of gold sitting on Comex vaults.

With silver the situation is even more extreme.  The Comex is reporting 29.5 million ozs of silver as registered and 190.2 million total ozs.  Yet, the open interest in paper silver is a staggering 1.08 billion ozs.  1.08 billion ozs of silver is more silver than the world mines in a year.  The paper silver open interest is 5x greater than the total amount of silver held in Comex vaults;  it’s an astonishing 37x more than the amount of silver that is available to be delivered.

This degree of imbalance between the open interest in CME futures contracts in relation to the amount of the underlying physical commodity represented by those contracts never occurs in any other CME commodity – ever.   Historically, when the amount of paper exceeds the amount of underlying commodity that is available for delivery by more than 20-30%, the CFTC intervenes by investigating the possibility of market manipulation.  But never with gold and silver.

The Comex is perhaps the most corrupted securities market in history.   It is emblematic of the fraud and corruption that has engulfed the entire U.S. financial and political system. The U.S. Government has now issued $20 trillion in Treasury debt for which it has no intention of every redeeming.  It’s issued over $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities (entitlements, pensions, etc) for which default is not a matter of “if” but of “when.”

In today’s episode of the Shadow of Truth, we discuss “The Big Lie,” which is also known as the “Comex,” and explain why those looking to protect their savings should be buying physical gold and silver now: