Is Silver A Sterling Investment?

With banks collapsing all around us, property prices plummeting, and Interest rates in freefall, where should you be Investing In these turbulent times?

The real case for investing in silver lies not on the demand side (although this is clearly growing), but on the supply side. Believe It or not, but silver really is quite rare. There are only 22 or 23 completely pure silver mines operating around the world , and overall production was flat this year and is expected to be flat again next year.

Mined silver has been insufficient to meet demand every single year for the last 15 years. According to the CPM Group, a commodity research provider based in New York, newly refined supply fell short of industrial demand by 44.5 million ounces in 2004 and will be short by another 31.4 million this year. This hasn't been a huge problem because the world has been able to meet the deficit from inventories, and sales from official stockpiles.

The US government stockpile is all but gone and sales from other official sources appear to be declining too (China sold over 60 million ounces in 2003, for example, but only 34 million in 2004). This means that the remaining reserves of above-ground metal held by the central banks of China, Russia and India from the melting down of withdrawn coinage are running down. In 1990, says CPM, there were around 2.2 billion ounces of silver held in above-ground stocks. Today, there are probably only about 300 million. That's a 50-year low.

Unlike gold, silver gets used up. About 95% of the gold ever mined still exists in above-ground refined form. In contrast, about 95% of the silver ever mined has been consumed by electronics and jewellery. And as a silver ring or necklace, for example, costs about $40 an ounce (spot silver currently costs just over $12 an ounce), the silver is not recoverable or recyclable at a profit to the silver jewellery buyer until we exceed those prices.

So while gold is skyrocketing in price, due to central banks switching from selling to buying, silver is going to skyrocket in price much more due to the silver shortage.

Investing is Silver has never been more accessable, and can be started for less than $50.
In fact it is possible to get free silver coins delivered to your door each month.

An excellent resource for Silver Investing is here: www.freesilvercoins.co.uk

An excellent resource for Silver Investing is here: http://www.freesilvercoins.co.uk