Silver's New York futures warehouses are refilling even as the metal runs its sixth straight annual deficit. FXEmpire argues the shortage did not vanish — it moved east, where Shanghai buyers pay an 11% premium for physical metal while Western funds sell paper.
A rebuilding COMEX vault and an 11% Shanghai premium describe the same silver market from two sides, according to FXEmpire. The West sets the headline price; the East is where the physical shortage shows up first. The metal sits near $61.50, down about 13% from its end-2025 close near $71, with gold around $4,150 and the gold-silver ratio near 67.
The vault build that looks like loosening
Registered silver — the metal pledged to settle COMEX futures — climbed to about 93.0 million ounces on the July 6 report, up from near 82 million ounces in mid-June. That is roughly an 11 million-ounce rise in three weeks, alongside 233.0 million ounces of eligible metal for a combined 326.0 million ounces. On its own, a growing deliverable pile reads as a market easing.
But it is not fresh metal from mines. FXEmpire attributes the increase to repositioning ahead of the July delivery month, with eligible stock reclassified into registered so it can settle contracts. The pool traders watch expands on paper — and that is the part the West sees.
Where the metal is actually tight
The East tells a different story. On the Shanghai Gold Exchange, silver's premium over the international price widened to roughly 11% by early July, up from high single digits at the June 30 fixes. Read net of local taxes and import costs, FXEmpire calls a double-digit premium the clearest live signal of where physical silver is genuinely tight.
Western demand, by contrast, stays soft. The largest silver ETF, SLV, saw net outflows of about $606 million over the past month, roughly 10 million ounces of selling, while 2026 American Silver Eagle premiums fell around $5 to $8 a coin. Meanwhile, Beijing's July 1 move to enforce strategic-mineral export controls — under which silver is reportedly licensed — keeps more metal inside China.
One deficit, two speeds
A structural deficit does not need every vault to drain each month. It needs demand to exceed supply across the year, and the market is in its sixth consecutive annual deficit — a shortfall of 46.3 million ounces per Metals Focus and the Silver Institute. In between, metal moves between regions, so one market can look loose while another runs tight.
FXEmpire frames the rebuilding New York warehouse as a symptom of that split rather than a refutation of the deficit. The publisher stresses this is not a price forecast: Western outflows are real, premiums can compress as fast as they widened, and a regional gap can persist longer than expected. Traders weighing how to trade silver get the throughline either way — the divergence between paper and physical.
Source: FXEmpire
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