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Any asset can be a shitcoin if retail bids it hard enough. There are good reasons for silver to have gone up, but nowhere near this much. Retail sees it, like gold, as a way to invest in "hard money", to avoid your dollars being inflated away, except it's cheaper than gold. And then they're not price sensitive about it at all. And then it gets high enough that speculators get washed out by new margin requirements, big buyers of silver get nervous they'll be screwed if it goes up more and lock in the price, people get short squeezed. For the same reason that accurate prices are good for an economy, this is bad for the economy! It causes silver to be inefficiently allocated among productive enterprises, all so gamblers can get their fix, because Seahawks vs Patriots isn't quite as exciting as pumping a trillion dollar market cap asset.
In a surprisingly apt example, The Great Silver Bubble says that movies were cancelled in 1979 because the Hunt brothers had created a shortage of film by buying up all the silver. The amount of heirloom silver melted down so short sellers could overpay for it and deliver it into the Hunts' longs was also socially destructive.
The good news that time is that the Hunts ended up paying for their fun - the unsuccessful attempt to corner the silver market cost them 1.7 billion dollars (6.5 billion adjusting for inflation, 17 billion adjusting for GDP growth, so a loss that would embarass Bill Gates but not Elon Musk)
And they only ended up paying for it because of pressure by the Fed. So much for the free market!
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I was wondering if/when someone would bring up the Hunt brothers in the context of this discussion. Once again, The Motte fails to disappoint!
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In Korea, "retail" or daytraders are called "ants": individually stupid and not a lot of money, but they can overwhelm other investors when they all move in the same direction.
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