He writes that SLV has “been raided heavily over the past,” and indeed  “17.9 million ounces…have been withdrawn from the ETF by authorized participants.” in just two months in 2010.

How does one evaluate this information?  Well, he goes on to write; “to put it another way, 3% of the world’s silver inventory disappeared in just seven weeks!” Well, there goes the neighborhood – and any continuing availability of discounted silver coins.

To put his report in perspective:

By 2008 worldwide demand for silver was about 900 million ounces a year, having grown by an average of 19.5 million ounces a year for the previous five years, while supply from mining and scrap was only 858.5 million ounces and growing at only 2.2% a year. In other words: Supply was being outstripped by over 40 million ounces per year!
If that is not enough of a supply/demand imbalance to make you run to your silver dealer, longer-term it gets more interesting, because “in 1900 there were 12 billion ounces of silver in the world. By 1990, that figure had been reduced to around 2.2 billion ounces,” and now “today, there are less than 1 billion ounces in above-ground refined silver.”
In short, all the silver that was mined and refined in the last 110 years has been used to create the gigantic electronic-based and electrical-powered economies of America and Europe, and now that all that silver has been used, here comes China in need of twice as much silver as was used by America and Europe!

Ignoring the economic and political reasons just this supply/demand equation is sufficient to drive silver to $60 an ounce in the next 12 - 18 months.