Yes, JPM is JP Morgan, or The JP Morgue as many like to say. They’re not just making Blythe look bad, they’re making JPM face hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for every dollar silver trades higher. I think Wynter calculated that if silver gets to $70 or $80 or so, JPM would be insolvent, just from silver losses (arising from an enormous short position). JPM isn’t paying COMEX the premium, they’re paying it to Wynter’s traders for agreeing to take fiat instead of silver, for their contracts that they bought and paid for fair and square. (Again, so the story goes.) I think they held something like a few thousand contracts, which by the way at $35 silver cost $175 grand each.
Then again, maybe Wynter’s people had just a few 100s of contracts, because I recall reading that they were funded with tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, but not billions. A thousand contracts would be $175 million, which might be more than their bank was. Actually a little less since they bought below $35 silver.