There's lots of global sources of silver. Several countries use it as the primary asset to back their own currencies. Silver production is more often a byproduct metal from other metal mining operations, such that the majority of silver produced each year is as a byproduct metal, as opposed to metal specifically mined in a silver mine. As a result, annual silver production is greatly tied to the global industrial demand for metals in general, as opposed to silver mining specifically. One consequence of this is silver production cannot be controlled by market forces. Only silver purchasing and trading can be influenced by market forces. Due to the high number of national central banks that use silver as their primary tier one national asset, no single bank or groups of banks, regardless of size, can control the market price of silver through cornering the market. There are huge reserve stockpiles of silver in multiple locations that are not traded on the daily markets. Nor are these stockpiles counted as available silver. Whenever the price of silver ranges too high, some of these stockpiles have been known to flood the market with additional silver. As such, the situation contributes to preventing any one party from cornering the market. You would need very deep pockets indeed to even attempt to do so. So, this is the true situation of silver. Big players do control the majority of silver ownership. The big players, however, are not all working together. Many do not get along so well with the globalists anyways. There is diversity of ownership of the major stockpiles that actually keep the silver price close to it's actual fair market price. There is so much surplus silver that vast stockpiles are not even traded at all. This is not hording behavior per say. It is the true situation that taking the silver price even lower brings no viable gains. They are better off not trading at this time, so they don't. Of course, if the world was to return to a gold standard, and that just might happen, then there is a very real shortage of global silver, and holders of silver stockpiles come out as the big winners. Despite the vast size of the current silver surplus, it is doubtful that it could satisfy the global need for currency without equally vastly inflating the price of silver to match the potential demand. The same price revaluation would also be needed for gold, as in, actual physical gold would have to be repriced at millions of dollars per ounce if we tried to use it to cover the current currency in circulation plus the electronic currency in the various banking systems. You can see just how badly our global fiat currencies have devalued in real purchasing power when you attempt to do this math. While paper gold is definitely used to suppress the price of gold as a deliberate act, paper silver is not needed to keep the price of silver suppressed. Paper silver is used mainly as a trading convenience between major parties across financial borders, specifically for the China trade laws. Paper gold was invented for this purpose as well, but since has become the primary tool the banks use to suppress gold prices. Suppressing gold prices also has a natural suppression effect on silver prices. They don't need paper silver to suppress silver prices. The world has surplus silver to such an extent that much of it isn't even on the market.