Nice distinction between paper and physical. We even see this with gold paper at spot while physical gold is still getting $100 over spot. Well, last I checked.
Gold and silver physical prices can catch up (or in this case down) to spot fairly readily. Big dealers just need to take delivery of short term paper futures. It’s still an unknown when the Fed’s inflation will turn the deflation around. One things for sure, they can’t “balance” monetary inflation and credit deflation. Either the monetary inflation gets swamped by deleveraging, or it takes over in very rapid asset inflation followed by yet another deflation.