I don’t have a very solid knowledge of the futures market; therefore, I would like to have as many people as possible furthering this discussion. I would like to speak about the fundamentals of the futures market and the current fear of the COMEX defaulting. In my understanding, companies project that they will produce some gold; therefore, some of them decide to sell gold in the futures market in order to receive cash in advance. However, not only mining companies can short sell gold, anyone can short sell gold. Therefore, if everyone decides to demand gold during the settlement of gold futures contracts at a given time, there will be a shortage of gold and only some people will be able to get gold whilst the rest gets money. Because anyone can short sell gold, there can be a rise in the supply of paper gold irrespective to the demand, thus resulting in a fall in the price of gold. When people realize there are more supply of paper gold than gold that can be supplied, prices fall even further causing a backwardation. When many people don’t get their gold and instead get money, there is a negative spike in the price of gold futures, crashing the futures market, while the price of physical gold spikes up. There can also be a crash in the COMEX if there is a large spike in the price of gold futures which would cause many speculative short-sellers to default with some people not getting fully paid, the problem could be amplified if the fiat currency in which the transaction is done loses its values rapidly, which would cause mining companies to settle the contract with fiat currency instead of gold either by cutting the production of gold or by fraudulently reporting that they don’t have gold in stock, perhaps some of them would be bankrupt because they would not be able to pay existing debts and would have even more liabilities because of the losses made in the futures market and would have to deal with inflation and no one to borrow from.
I’ve been following this. Some people call Comex, Crimex. 
They guy that made the default chart admits he misunderstood the situation. I just read about this at Kitco. Here’s a link provided in that thread:
Can someone tell me what causes the shortage of gold and silver?? Is it because of production related problems or fraudulent activities?