More on the Case for Silver Markets

by David Galland

Warming up the digits today, I can’t help but note that gold broke in to new record territory – above $1,380 in the overnight markets.

A new record in nominal terms, that is. To top the previous high in inflation-adjusted dollars, gold will have to approximately double from here.

Silver, however, hasn’t even made it halfway back to its prior nominal high of $49.45 an ounce, achieved on January 21, 1980. In order to break in to new territory in inflation-adjusted dollars (using the same CPI calculation methodology used in 1980), silver would have to rise to over $250 an ounce – five times where it is today.

Since I’ve strayed into the topic of silver, I want to briefly expound on the silver stats I mentioned in passing following our recently concluded Gold & Resource Summit. Urged on by one dear reader, I dug a bit deeper to come up with the following overview I hope you’ll find useful.

Due to the fact that silver’s industrial applications result in destroying the stuff, there is currently a total of only 1,234,590,000 “investable” ounces of silver in aboveground supplies. At $21 per ounce, the total value of aboveground silver comes to only about $26 billion dollars. (more)