How Best Stocks Investors Get Educated
Ted Butler and I occasionally disagree. When we disagree with people we respect and have learned so much from (as I have read him weekly for years), it's usually a very enlightening experience for both people, as well as other observers.

Ted writes this week that there are no organizations educating investors about silver, as there are about gold, such as the World Gold Council.

Wrong on two counts, in my opinion. First of all, in my opinion, the World Gold Council is an anti-gold pro-banking establishment player that promoted gold in the last year or so as jewelry for ugly women as a way to "generate", or more accurately, "hurt" sales. The WGC also ignores gold as an investment. The WGC also ignores the reality of central bank gold sales which has been suppressing the gold price. A real pro-gold organization, is barely funded, hates the multi-million dollar funded WGC, and the clueless miners who fund them.
There is another group that is more interesting that also gathers statistics on silver, namely, cpmgroup.com. This company's president is Jeff Christian.

Most investment banks who publish statistics on silver, base their own studies, at least in part, on the statistical surveys sent out to the silver miners, refiners, and other silver industry groups, by the cpmgroup.

Even I use their stats regularly, to promote the general bullish case on silver. For example, the CPM group says about 550 million oz. of silver is mined each year, and the silverinstitute says it's about 650 million, so I just ballpark it and say 600, and cite those two as sources regularly.

The main stats are that total demand is about 900 million oz., with other supply sources being recycling of about 200 million oz., and government selling of about 50 million oz.

Investor selling, or buying makes up the difference between total demand and total supply.

Right now, investors are buying about 150 million oz/year, while most of silver is going into industry at about 400 million oz., and jewelry of about 200 million oz., and photography of about 150 million oz.

Thus, any significant investor increases must mean either a rising price, or a decline from the other categories.

But what the silver statistic reporting groups don't reveal, which I found recently from an astute reader, is that the BIS reported $190 billion of other precious metal derivatives, which must be mostly all fraud, since the entire silver industry is barely $11 billion per year, (900 million x $13) and is certainly not all hedged, and platinum and palladium are even smaller industries.