Apparently JP Morgan said (rumour?) to have closed some shorts...

Apparently JP Morgan said (rumour?) to have closed some shorts at the COMEX via cash payments at a premium. Now I understand that this might be illegal, supposedly happened anyway? Not sure anyone knows or has heard of anything about this.

Also the net short position in the US has fallen only to see a rise in short positions from non-US sources. Did JP Morgan just off load shorts off-shore to institutions they have close relationships with, possibly own?

Safe to say that most commodity exchanges have more paper silver than physical silver on their books. Interesting to see how this all finishes up. Reckon the big banks will win either way, i.e make money on their silver stocks if silver shoots up. Guess it will not be good for the dollar if silver takes off. US government at this point can't possibly raise interest rates and thus hurt silver (that would probably cause riots with all the new homeless that would result). You get the feeling that investors outside of the US sense blood and are trying to initiate a short squeeze. The Hunt brothers caused something similar to happen in the 70's. However the COMEX just changed the rules and that was that. The Hunt brothers only captured 10 % of the market and caused so much hysteria. Today things are different, there are many exchanges and more forces at play. Wasn't like the monopoly type system before where the COMEX dominated the show.

China also produces some half the world's silver supply. This is an interesting point which a lot of people are not talking about. If China decides to squeeze supply this will be significant. They have done something similar with rare earth metals just recently causing the price of rare earths to sky rocket. This coupled with China allowing its citizens to buy physical silver makes me think? Plenty of the investment into silver is coming form Asia. As I understand there is a global short-fall of annual silver production. This has lead to depletion of reserves from banks/governments. Apparently the US had several billion ounces reserve silver in the past 10-20 years. All this has virtually been depleted covering the production short-fall.
Very interesting to see how this all pans out. The silver bugs have been harping on about all this the past 10 years and now there is some movement at the station.