RE:I wonder what it all means when....Not boring at all...
The short side and the use of "paper" gold is an indication of how disconnected the PM market has become from the reality of supply and demand for the physical. At some point the "disconnect" is going to break and being long in a PM producer is going to look like genius investing.
In particular, being long in a small scale, low cost silver producer in a safe jurisdiction is going to be a brilliant move. BHS is very small and has, relatively speaking, very few shareholders. Which means that BHS may be able to offer physical silver to those shareholders on a preferential basis. Having a line into .9999 pure silver straight from the mine could make BHS shares even more attractive if the PM markets blow up.
My sense is that the PM markets will actually do a managed collapse with gold being rerated significantly and silver following. But the gold and silver markets are very different. Gold is tied into the monetary system in a way silver is not. If would not surprise me at all if gold's price was supressed in an effort to keep the dollar stable, while silver was allowed to find its natural price point. Silver is a much smaller market than gold. It might well be allowed to act as a sort of safety valve on a system desperate to shed risk.
As The Donald would say, "We'll wait and see."