Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Silver and Gold

I keep reading "silver is the sleeping commodity!". "Silver has the potential to rise x percent!" "Buy silver, you won't regret it!" Always this is predicated on the fact that the ratio of prices of silver to gold are at a historic low. And this is true. But does it necessarily matter?

I'm thinking "no." The problem is that gold and silver are used differently than they were historically. Prior to the twentieth century both were money: silver for the average person, gold for people moving larger quantities of value. During the early twentieth century, silver was not money per se, but coins were still made from silver, though they were valued at a considerably higher rate relative to the dollar (in gold) than they were worth on the open market. Once the dollar was decoupled from gold, of course the silver price had to rise relative to the ever expanding dollar, and ultimately had to be abandoned as the material of choice for coinage.

Today, silver is not money. People still use gold as a store of value. Central banks still use gold as a store of value. In the face of a changing world monetary system, in which the U.S. Dollar can no longer be relied upon as a reserve currency, central banks and individuals are using gold as a store of value more than in the recent past, and this trend will probably continue. But silver? In an era when even paper money is giving way to electronically transmitted credits, I sincerely doubt silver will return to a monetary role, not to any appreciable degree, anyway. I believe the prior advantage of silver was that it could be used for smaller transactions than gold, and had many of the advantages of gold to a lesser degree. Paper and electronic credits have completely replaced silver in the "small transactions" world, even in places that completely lack a government, like Somalia. Of course, this could easily change were the world's political system to collapse in a violent and lasting fashion and paper and credits became unreliable in the chaos that followed... but if this happens I sincerely doubt the lack of silver would be the greatest of one's problems.

That isn't to say I don't believe people that don't own any silver shouldn't buy any. It's probably a good idea to keep some small amount around "just in case". But while gold retains a monetary function and will likely continue to do so, I don't see silver doing so. I believe the historic lows in the silver-to-gold ratio is not the result of sleeping investors. I believe it is the result of fundamental changes in demand for the two metals. Gold retains a monetary demand in addition to its industrial and luxury demand. Silver does not.

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