24hGold has republished a 4-year-old essay by the economic historian Antal Fekete speculating, as silver market analyst Ted Butler long has done, that China is the major short in the silver market.

"The Chinese," Fekete writes, "are alive to the fact that escaped the silver bugs in the West -- that you can derive a silver income from your pile of silver by covered short selling, even while retaining physical control of your silver hoard. This is an unprecedented bonanza in the history of money. It has never before happened that you earn interest while retaining physical control of your money. Typically you have to release control of money to earn interest income -- that is, you have to assume risk. Lending money necessarily involves risks: The borrower may default. But if you don't give up physical control, then you will escape the monetary debacle unscathed. Because of the imbecility of the managers of the paper dollar standard there exist durable risk-free profit opportunities in holding monetary metals in the balance sheet. The trick is: covered selling. That's possible because the price of monetary metals has been allowed to fluctuate. The price fluctuation of a monetary metal, like the flow-and-ebb of the oceans, represents energy -- energy that can be harnessed, energy that can be harnessed only by those who understand monetary economics."

Fekete's commentary is headlined "The Double Whammy of Geopolitical Gold Games" and it's posted at 24hGold here:

http://www.24hgold.com/english/news-gold-silver-the-double-whammy-of-geo...