The point is that we are in the midst of a commodities cycle, meaning that the hot new asset is shifting from stocks and real estate?paper assets, to oil, gold, and silver?commodities. And if you get into investing in commodities before they really start to heat up, you stand to see alot of upside for commodities if you get in on them at the right time.
Although oil and gold will rise significantly in price, it?s nothing compared to the gains some believe silver will make in the coming years.
For the first 2,000 years that gold and silver were the primary form of money across the globe, the exchange rate between the two metals averaged 12 ounces of silver to 1 ounce of gold. In other words, silver?s value was 1/12th that of gold. However, it would vary by region and time period.
In China, during the Ming Dynasty, for instance, the exchange rate was 4 ounces of silver to 1 ounce of gold, and in ancient Egypt silver had the same value as gold; but, on the average, the ratio has been about 12 to 1.
The reason for the 12 to 1 ratio was that gold and silver were money, circulating side by side, and the free markets balanced the scales. The ratio is set by the marketplace doing what it does naturally, which is discovering the fair price of something.
This means that on average there was probably about 12 times more silver in circulation than gold throughout history. It is simply the market finding the price/quantity equilibrium based on the relative rarity of the two metals.
However, in the late 1800s Western silver discoveries and technological advances added significantly to supplies. This and other factors caused the value of silver to plummet to 1/100th of gold?s value.
Then, during the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt signed the Silver Purchase Act of 1934, and the U.S. began to amass the world?s largest stockpile of silver. There were a few more silver purchases in the 1950s, and the stockpile peaked at 3.5 billion ounces.
But by the early 1960s silver?s price had risen to $1.29 per ounce, not because silver was scare, but because currency was too abundant. Silver was just catching up to inflation of the currency supply. At $1.29 per ounce, the silver content in U.S. silver coinage equaled the face value of the silver coin.
If silver?s price were to rise any further, people could make a profit by going to the bank and getting a bunch of change, melting it down, and selling the silver. The government knew this and began selling silver to keep the price down.
Throughout most of the 1970s silver?s price ranged from $3 to $6, buoyed by Nixon?s abolishment of the gold standard and an increase in the currency supply. Many investors sold much of their silver at a profit.
But in 1979, prices began to rise rapidly. People stopped selling silver, and for the second time in history the public became net buyers of silver.
The first time the public became net buyers of silver it forced the government to discontinue the issuance of the last ?real money? (silver) in the U.S. and replace it with copper and zinc tokens. This time, public buying of silver would cause the metal?s price to explode to upward of $50 per ounce.
The point of giving this background information is to show how events in the past will lead up to silver being the BEST investment in the coming years.
So when investors became net buyers of silver in the 1960s, it forced the government to abandon silver as money, and when investors became net buyers of silver in 1979, the price catapulted to over $50. Well guess what? In 2006, for only the third time in U.S. history, the public became net buyers of silver once again.
But there are huge differences between 1980 and today. This silver bull market will make the last one seem insignificant.
For most of the 1980s, the public did what they always do. When they should have been investing in stocks, they chased yesterday?s news and continued buying gold and silver. But that changed as we entered the 1990s.
Investors who had paid $5 to $50 per ounce were caught up in the stock market craze that had started in the 1980s, and they sold their silver, usually at a loss, to purchase stocks. From 1990 to 2005 investors sold more silver than they bought.a lot more. Conversely, they bought a lot more stocks than they sold.a lot more.
According to the CPM Group (one of the leading commodities market research and consulting firms in the precious metals industry), investors sold 1.6 billion ounces of silver from 1990 to 2005. That?s almost nine times the amount investors sold in the 1970s.
And it?s not only the public that has been shedding their silver holdings. Governments around the world have stopped using silver as coinage and have been selling off their stockpiles.
In fact, since the 1960s, a time when every government on the planet had significant silver reserves and used silver as coinage, and a time when the U.S. controlled 3.5 billion ounces (the single largest silver stockpile in history), all governments have been selling off their silver inventories.
This extra supply has had the effect of artificially depressing the price. Today governments around the world are essentially out of silver. These government fire sales were accompanied by investor sales of around 1.6 billion ounces from 1990 to 2005.
This had the effect of artificially depressing silver?s price to such low levels that in many cases the price was below mining costs, putting some primary silver producers out of business.
So if the government was selling silver, and investors were selling silver, just who was buying silver?
The answer: industrial manufacturers. The silver that was sold was used to make consumer goods.
Of all the elements, silver is THE indispensable metal. It is the most electrically conductive, thermally conductive, and reflective. Modern life, as we know it, would not exist without silver.
Photography, batteries, electronics.these things all came of age, and became widely available, during, or shortly after, World War II, and then absolutely exploded in use after the 1960s due to scientific discoveries regarding the industrial applications of silver.
Unlike silver, gold only has two basic uses, and both are hoarding type uses where the metal doesn?t get used up.?real money? and jewelry. Less than 10 percent of gold production is used in industrial applications. 90 percent of all the gold ever mined throughout history is still available for purchase somewhere.
Silver, on the other hand, has hundreds of industrial of industrial uses and applications. Here is a small example of the multitude of uses for silver: batteries, bearings, biocides, brazing, catalysts, coins, electrical conductors, electronics, electroplating, jewelry, medical applications, mirrors and reflective coatings, photography, silverware, solar energy cells, soldering, water purification.
Of all the uses for silver, only jewelry and silverware result in saving the silver used; in all other uses, silver gets used up in microscopic amounts, thrown away, and eventually ends up in the landfill. That?s where those billions of ounces went
In 1980 there were 2.5 billion ounces of silver that investors could buy, and by 1990 it stood at 2.1 billion ounces. Today, stockpiles are almost nonexistent. The point is that for the first time in history, of the available quantities that investors can buy, silver is more rare than gold.
Of the once mighty silver stockpile the U.S. held in the late 1950s and early 1960s, only 0.0056 percent remains. It has dwindled from 3.5 billion ounces to a mere 20 million ounces. And the rest of the world?s governments have followed suit.
We have gone from a world in which every country used silver as money, and also held large stockpiles of silver in reserve, to a world that is just about out of silver. In fact, if you add up all government stockpiles of silver worldwide, the total is only 0.016 percent of what just the U.S. alone used to hold.
The only reason silver is so cheap right now is because people ?think? it should be cheap. They?ve been conditioned to think that because governments have been dumping their silver into the markets for half a century.
This extra supply has had the effect of suppressing silver?s price, and the low price has resulted in our consuming more silver than we produced for over half a century. And as of 2007 governments pretty much have run out of silver, and they?ve stopped selling just as investor interest is rising.
But as you now know, there is almost no silver left for investors to buy. And Economics 101: When there is great demand and minimal supply, prices will skyrocket.
But wont they just mine more silver? The short answer is: yes. But the good news for silver investors is that most silver supplies don?t come from silver mining operations.
Rather, silver supplies are often a by-product of mining copper, lead, zinc, and gold. In fact, about 75 percent of the supply of newly mined silver originates as a by-product of mining other metals. The silver is just a bonus to these mining companies. So, they sell it on the market; but the point is their business is not dependent on the price of silver.
If a copper miner gets one percent of his income from silver, he?s certainly not going to dig up ten times more copper to increase his silver production by a factor of ten. So, the burden to satisfy silver demand falls on the shoulders of what are known as primary silver producers, and they?re rare.
Currently silver mine production stands at a little over 500 million ounces per year. Primary silver producers only produce 25 percent of that, or 125 million ounces per year. If you could freeze demand where it is today, and the primary silver producers were able to double production, it would take more than 15 years to get silver inventories back to the level they were in 1990; but demand is rising because the rest of the world wants the same standard of living as the Western world.
But wont they just open more silver mines? Again the short answer is: yes. But the world wide average for taking a mine from discovery to production is 5 to 7 years, and in countries with strong environmental laws, it can take much longer.
In the U.S., for instance, even if you found a deposit of pure silver or gold, if it were in a state like California, you wouldn?t ever get a permit to mine due to the state?s stringent environmental laws. Additionally, the big prospecting wont start until the price is at much higher levels.
And to top it all off, due to the long bear market in precious metals there is a severe shortage of experienced workers with the specialized knowledge required for mining operations.
Also, the world isn?t just running out of silver aboveground either, it?s also running out of silver IN the ground. Minable deposits of silver are becoming harder to find.
According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), at current rates of production, the two metals we will run out of first are gold and silver. At these rates gold reserves will be exhausted in 30 years and silver in 25 years. At current rates of production, there is less minable silver left in the earth?s crust than any other metal.
As the dollar continues to lose value, big investors will first turn toward gold and dramatically drive up its price. By the time the general public catches on, gold will look pretty expensive to them. But everybody will then start hearing about silver being rarer than gold.
In a frenzy, people will dive into silver, just as stockpiles are practically diminished and production has practically stopped. That is when silver will explode.
So it?s a safe assessment to say that silver is extremely undervalued at the present time. And remember that for the first 2,000 years of history that the exchange rate between gold and silver was 12 ounces of silver to 1 ounce of gold on average.
Now here?s the exciting part. Given enough time, values always revert to the mean. But when something is severely out of whack, it will usually overshoot the mean before settling back in. The longer and further out of whack it is, the further it will usually overshoot.
For more than a century, the gold/silver ratio has been very out of whack, currently the exchange rate between silver and gold is almost 70 to 1. You can bet that when a run on silver happens, this ratio will come screaming back, and I?m pretty confident that it will snap way past the historical average of 12 to 1.
And, because there is less silver than gold for investors to buy, I believe it may even go so far as to meet or exceed the price of gold. Now you know why silver really is a ?precious? metal.
It is no wonder why the American Silver Eagle coins are widely sought after and have come to be extremely valuable. Over the past two years, this annually released coins' production has been reduced in its varieties available or completely halted. The 2008 uncirculated coins sold over 444,000 before it's...
Source: http://www.bellybone.net/30517/investing-in-silver-why-silver-will-be-the-best-investment/
david garrard matt nathanson matt nathanson indy car grace potter grace potter kinder morgan
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