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Gold/Mining/Energy : Silver prices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TD who wrote (2246)	10/17/1999 9:00:00 PM
From: goldsheet	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8010

> The article ask but never answers: Why is silver so cheap? 2/3 of silver production is a by-product of other metals. Those miners are concerned with the economics of their primary metals (usually copper and gold) and will extract the silver, dump it on the market, and count the revenue as a credit to their primary metals. Silver is cheap because 2/3 of the producers don't really care about its price.

To: TD who wrote (2246)	10/17/1999 9:05:00 PM
From: koan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 8010

TD - Good post and good article, but she never arrives at the $64 question - why is silver so cheap? If anybody's got a good theory I am sure we would all like to hear it. I don't have a clue. I would settle for a clue, come to think of it.

To: TD who wrote (2246)	10/30/1999 7:36:00 PM
From: TD	Respond to of 8010

Common Sense and Common Men Common Sense and Common Men As an exercise in understanding value, this article is useful in assessing money versus value and wages as a constant in history. If we look at the Bible we find that a Shekel was four day?s wages for the common worker. A shekel is about .364 troy ounces of silver. Therefore one troy ounce of silver would be worth about eleven days worth of work. A month?s wages would be equal to three troy ounces of silver and a years worth of effort would equate to 36 ounces of silver. Let?s compare this to today?s standard. The minimum wage is nearly six ?dollars? per hour. Or perhaps better stated as one ounce of silver per hour, so a typical day is worth eight ounces of silver. A month is worth about 275 ounces and a year?s worth of effort would equate to 3300 ounces of silver. If you were working toward a retirement fund in 1BC a savings of 1000 ounces of silver would represent about 27 years worth of savings. In today?s world a thousand ounces of silver represents about four month?s work. Let?s be really ridiculous for a moment and wave our magic wand. Our wand is capable of making the ?people? all wish to preserve some of their savings in silver. Let?s say for our example that everyone in American decides to buy a day?s wages in silver. Although the average wage is greater than the minimum, let?s simply use eight ounces as previously discussed. Now eight troy ounces times 100 million workers is equal to 800 million ounces of silver or a year?s worth of silver mining for the entire world. Let?s get real funny and wave our wand again and pay our workers in money (silver) for a year, why not if enough people demanded money rather than credit life might be different. OK, so a day?s wages in the USA would be 800 million ounces of silver. Right now there is about 900 million ounces of silver available to the market and the potential to mine about that much per year, so all known silver would be used in two days! We could go to Gold, since there is four times more gold in reserve than silver we would use up all gold reseves in eight days if it were priced the same as silver. Of course we all know gold is about 50 times more expensive than silver. So for our example gold would last 8 days times 50 or 400 days, therefore people could be payed in gold ( in the USA only) for over a year before the reserves were completely depleted.