[read_wharf]

"Of course, there’s a catch. You couldn’t offload all those metals on the world market at once, for fear of crashing their prices. But the company would still own that much in equity, which would allow them to borrow against it. They would be that wealthy, to all intents and purposes. That’s just how capitalism works."

You don't have equity to borrow against unless you can liquidate and transfer to the lender.

You can't liquidate and transfer to the lender unless you can bring it all down here (destroying the market and making the equity worth much less), or transfer any on-going and steady operation that is bringing it down little by little (show me the money), or by bring us up there in the form of widespread operations across multiple companies.

If we go up there in a big way, well, precious metals aren't so precious.

[RandallBrown]

It doesn't really matter though does it? The people backing this company have billions of dollars they can throw at this until it makes money.