Silver has 5:1 above ground quantities relative to gold and is extracted at a rate of 9:1 in quantity relative to gold. It has spectacular properties in many regards, being the best metallic conductor (electrical/thermal) and is also the most reflective. The price ratio of 60:1 between gold and silver cannot really be justified. Even if we go with the crowd's wisdom and tradition, everything that applies about the historic value of gold, also applies for the value of silver. Yet silver was rated from ~10:1 to 17/19:1 in coinage (1800s/1900s), not 50 to 80:1 which is the current range for the last few years.
So, for all intents and purposes, silver is currently the best value for money. It's a precious metal, it is useful, it has industrial demand, etc etc. Additionally the supply curve indicates that, in the long run, there'll have to be a convergence between the 60:1 and the actual supply (9:1) for if demand is balanced then silver stocks will be depleted very rapidly (as they do, gradually)... So why not silver?
Agreed, if you are implying silver will rise much more than gold. The silver investment market is very small compared to the gold investment market too, so for investment purposes, it's even better than 5:1.
What do you think is the reason the SG ratio was so much smaller in earlier centuries - what happened in the 20th century? In Roman times it was 12:1.
I'm not really implying a rise because the market is manipulated, so... but it is manipulated in ways that are larger than simple price fixing. Cheap silver could currently be used in a multitude of electronic devices to increase their efficiency by 6-10% depending the copper they currently use. It could be used in transformers, rotors, wiring etc. In microelectronics where the PCBs are very small, the cost would be negligible as a cost per unit and it would also relieve the need for gold plating the contacts. An electric motor though for a car would be a different story as the wiring would need a few thousand $$$ extra (a few kgs), but, in light of the total cost, and the increased efficiency, it could be worth it - after all it is not money that is wasted, the silver is still there for removal at any time. Thing is, they won't let the industry use silver in such a way because then the price would skyrocket due to massive demand.
As for the ratio, the recent spike is related to the removal of silver coinage and the elite focusing more on the hoarding of gold, rather than silver. Gold is more hoarded and, as such, rarer to find in the marketplace in adequate quantities. Silver, on the other hand, is not stockpiled in vaults to the same degree as gold. It's really more hoarding in gold vs less hoarding in silver that has led to the current ratio.
That sucks, sorry to hear that! Let's see how much longer clueless and scared politicians will carry on with the failed Euro.
What do you mean by "the Euro has become so scarce..."? What are the mechanics behind this and what do people use for payment then?
The mechanics are simple: Daily expenses, a lot of taxation* and banks demanding the loans back depletes the circulating currency. This is worsened by a negative trade balance (more currency leaving the country than what is entering the economy), a near halt of credit expansion by the banks (they don't give new loans) and government attempting to achieve a surplus, which in other words means that it plunders the citizens more money than it gives back through services, wages etc.
In short, you have more money taken from the people than being given to them which is a recipe for euro-scarcity. 30% unemployment also means that not many people are making money right now, so how are they supposed to have any money? There are no unemployment benefits worthy of mention and even if one qualifies, it's like 300-400 euro for a few months and it's over.
* Taxation has reached unimaginable lengths of unfairness where people are being taxed for simply being alive. Every citizen is assumed to be creating an income of 3000 euros just because they happen to be alive. The rationale is "if you are living, then you are somehow eating, drinking, etc - so there is no way you are not having an income, and based on this ASSUMPTION, I will tax you". On top of that imaginary income, further imaginary income is added if one has a car or a house. So if you have, say, a 1000cc car and a 50 square meter apartment, you may be taxed as having an income of 8000 euros, which could tally up to something like 2000 euros for direct tax, property tax, car tax etc. That applies even if one is making ZERO income. The rationale is "how do you eat, live, have a car, a house etc without having 8000 income? Therefore you have that type of income, and so I will tax you". I know people abroad hear about tax evading greeks etc, but they never hear about the insanity of the tax system where even homeless people have to pay taxes. Greece is the most over-taxed nation right now on the planet. You could be working all day and paying
>100% of your income in taxes if you are self-employed. Nobody can beat that level of taxation.
well silver is mined as far as i know, the majority of it, with other metals... as a "by-product", really there are (at least from what i read) a minimum of purely silver mines, the majority of the mines in which silver is mined are mining primarely something else (like i dont know, iron copper, etc. and it happens that silver is often also present, so its mined also, but only as a "side product". So maybe the boom in technology in 20th century meant that there were a lot of new mines discovered and opened (iron, copper etc.) and thus more of these metals were mined, and thus also more silver was mined, and thus there was suddenly more silver available and thus the price went down... but this is just my quick teory, didnt research it and didnt even thought about it more. (but on the other hand, silver si widely used in a lot of industries which were not in the past, so the demand is stronger, so also the price should be higher, which it is not, which is weird...
The economics of silver mining, due to the price of silver, disallow silver mining operations except in very rare cases of quite rich deposits. Thus a process of "merged mining" is employed where a mine extracts multiple metals to increase its viability. Usually copper, lead and other metals are the primary metal of extraction and silver, or even small quantities of gold, can be secondary metals that simply add further value to the mining operation.
Why was it gold in the first first first place thousand of years ago i dont know, it was a rare metal probably, good looking, people didnt know about similiar metals and thus it was used and it simply "stucked" and when something "stucks" it present a good power... Why use platina or rhodium instead of gold when gold and silver are so established as money... theres no reason... Sure if gov. push and media publish propaganda, people might be using platina instead of gold or something else... But it would need to be a steady and hard long lasting push and it wont be natural... In natural way, theres no need to use something else (platina) instead of gold.