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Seventeen days ago, silver was $90/oz from APMEX. That was list price of a 1oz round, shipped and everything. Spot price was ~$80.
Today, it's $120 shipped, $110 spot, over +30% in a little over two weeks.
Gold is at $5185 for a single round delivered to your door, up from 4650, or 11%. Using spot it's about 12%.
Is this hyperinflation? Is this de-dollarization? A bubble? Does this have anything to do with Venezuela? With Iran? Taiwan? AI?
I'm honestly grasping at straws here, because metals aren't supposed to do this. I've been worried about the specter of hyperinflation since 2008, but it never really materialized, and so my worries were able to be soothed by looking at the lack of hyperinflation in reality.
You can't even tell anything happened in 2008 when you look at the money supply, but you can't help but notice that we've nearly x5 the money supply since December 2019.
Then again, silver is a useful metal. It gets blown up in missiles, it gets used in microchips and electronics, solar and battery technology, and more. Business building these things will simply pay the price for the metal they need and then use it, driving the price up regardless of speculation, but I can't believe that the usefulness of silver has quadrupled in the time since it was going for $25/oz.
Markets do stupid shit all the time now. Best analysis I’ve seen in production costs are $25/30 per ounce and solar power profits collapse to $0 at $125 an ounce. Bitcoin has collapsed right now too. It’s probably free money shorting over 1-2 years if you can handle the volatility of supply and demand balancing while retail punters work thru the market. Mstr raised like $50b last year for an etf at a 4x premium to bitcoin so there has been plenty of the markets do stupid things now.
You likely need the price level to go up 4x so $25/ounce mining becomes $100/ounce or very big changes in supply needs for AI chips that has to be silver. The best I can tell a lot of industrial demand disappears in this $120 area within a year and longer a lot of supply can enter the market around $30
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