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Gold/Mining/Energy : Pacific Rim Mining V.PFG -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Just Wayne who wrote (8531)	2/3/1998 7:23:00 PM
From: Lilian Debray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14627

And more again on silver. Monday's silver fix at midday showed the beginnings of a forward stretch, with spot metal quoted at 625 cents compared with three-month, six-month and one-year silver at 617.95 cents, 612.45 cents and 609.15 cents respectively. February 3, 1998 Silver prices soar to new nine-year highs NEW YORK (Reuters) - Silver prices soared to nine-year highs Tuesday, as supplies evaporated to levels not seen in more than a decade. "Silver is just not available, it didn't go up in the last space shuttle, and is supposedly on the ground in the vaults in London, but for some reason is just not available," said Scott Mehlman, chief bullion dealer with Credit Lyonnais Rouse in New York. "Since the NYMEX (New York Mercantile Exchange) statement last Friday, the floodgates have opened, one-month silver lease rates soared to nearly 25 percent today and prices have soared," he said. COMEX silver futures gained 36.7 cents to end at $6.615 an ounce Tuesday, after seeing a new contract high at $6.630 intraday. COMEX silver total volume was estimated at a high 41,000 lots. In the bullion market, spot silver ended quoted $6.76/80, the highest levels since July 1988, silver fixed at $6.3850 in London Tuesday, the highest fix since November 1988. The silver forward price curve remains highly backwardated, while one-month silver lease rates jumped to 25 percent. The silver forward price curve has not seen a persistent backwardation since 1980. "Backwardation" is a market price structure where prices for immediate delivery of a commodity are higher than prices for delivery at some time in the future. Normally, prices for future delivery are higher to account for the costs of storage and finance. NYMEX President Patrick Thompson said Friday there was "absolutely no basis" for the allegations the COMEX silver futures market was being manipulated. Last week, the New York law firm of Lovell and Stewart sued in federal court in New York, alleging the silver market was being manipulated by Phibro Inc. and others, by removing silver inventories from the COMEX warehouse and shipping them to London in order to create the impression of a supply shortage and thereby force up silver prices. COMEX warehouse silver stocks fell a further 327,101 ounces in Monday night's data to a new 12-year low at 103,778,089 ounces, after falling more than 7 million ounces in the past two weeks and nearly 50 percent in the past year. Meanwhile, Peter Fava, chairman of the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA), said Tuesday the LBMA could consider the idea of regularly issuing data on London stocks of silver. While COMEX publishes daily data on its warehouse stocks, the LBMA only supplies data on silver held in bullion-bank member vaults to the Bank of England and does not release them publicly, analysts said. The absence of the data makes it difficult to tell whether silver stocks are tight or whether they are simply held off market, an uncertainty which helped fuel the 50 percent rise in silver prices in late 1997. "Silver demand from India, the world's largest silver importer, is likely to drop significantly if prices hold above the $6.00 level -- especially with the Indian rupee down to a fresh record low against the U.S. dollar, and the depressed gold market an attractive substitute," Salomon Smith Barney analyst David Rinehimer said in a report. But "if deliverable silver stocks continue to decline at a steady pace and the market backwardation becomes more pronounced, an acceleration of the speculative buying could support a price rally above the $7.00 level," he said.