This link seems absurd in its statistics, unless I am tired late at night. It says available world silver is 500 Moz in 2010, which at my estimate is only of the order of 10,000 - 15,000T. Yet as I mentioned, Peru, Australia, Poland have reserves EACH of ten times that, the world fifty times that, and more than 30,000 T is mined each year. I think we basically just mine what silver we need, and don't stockpile it. But the world reserves of 500,000 T would indicate that we could readily produce lots of it if the demand was greater, and we could rapidly find much greater reserves if there was a reason to do so - it behaves like a normal commodity, unlike gold which we hoard. Since its uses are mostly industrial, unlike gold, since it is not sought so much for its beauty, and since it is destroyed over time by oxidation, I am not clear why one should assume it will suddenly become more valuable. China (Hong Kong) and India are outstandingly the largest importers of gold, followed by the UK as a poor third, and this has been the case for a long time - it is traditional, used as a store of wealth, mostly in jewellery (eg and in dowries). Why would these countries decide to change to major silver imports - and without that the silver price will simply fluctuate relative to annual supply and demand and not do any long-term climb (so mostly just useful for short-term speculation)? The USA, UK, Japan, Canada and India are the main silver importers, almost certainly for its main use (industrial), although I noticed that it is widely consumed as fine silver leaf on sweet cakes etc in India (presumably a uniquely Indian custom which I doubt would be a major demand).Swinging & digging said:
The reason there are less silver only mines nowadays is that one requires very high grades to be economic on its own, unlike gold (i.e. relative to typical grades that occur in deposits of these metals). The preoccupation with gold seems very American, and presumably comes from the fact that many high-grade silver mines were mined in the Americas, originally mined by Spain until it lost/gave California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Texas etc to the USA (Spain used to be to have a silver not gold standard because it had a bit of a monopoly on silver as a result, in central and South America as well (I have spent some time looking at these mines). But this silver standard was abandoned in favour of gold, and silver came to be a by-product of major lead-zinc mining, with a reliable constant supply, the reason Australia has huge silver reserves eg Mt Isa, Broken Hill, Cannington etc.). However the high-grade mines of the Americas tend to be narrow epithermal vein systems, that have poor economics in these days of large tonnage open-pit and block-cave type mining.
Silver and gold prices do tend to vary together:
I don't know the reason for this, but can only think that it might be related to its (subordinate) use in jewellery and (subordinate) by-product production from gold mines - it is a bit of a mystery to me.
