There are more than 24 million USD worth of bids at MtGox. There were only 12 million USD in bids a few weeks ago.
Doesn't that also mean there's twice as many sellers as last week? I.e. people wanting to cash out.
No, the number of bids only indicate that people want to buy BTC, and the amount of fiat on MtGox.
A few other observations:
- Spread between MtGox and Bitstamp/BTC-E has been steadily decreasing.
- MtGox is slowly gaining market share over Bitstamp and BTC-E.
- The spread between Bitstamp (Europe/international) and CampBX (USSA) is much higher than the spread between MtGox and Bitstamp
- USD's share of Bitcoin trades is decreasing at an accelerating rate. About 55% now. (In reality it is even lower, skewed by Bitstamp etc.)
It looks like people in the USSA are desperate to get out while the rest of the world are buying and trading. This pushes the price down at exchanges trading in USD (as in USD fiat, not just using USD as a one-fiat-currency-for-all like Bitstamp) while the price increases at the international exchanges. For the rest of the world getting fiat out of MtGox is simpler, and it isn't very much of an issue anyway because people in the rest of the world are there to buy, not sell. Prices on local international exchanges are even higher.
Before the USD problems started about 30% of MtGox's customers were USSAnians. This share is probably much lower now, and for this reason the USD problems have even lower impact on MtGox than it used to.