More About Silver’s Imminent Price Explosion

Yesterday on SurvivalBlog (27 Jan.06) , I posted my take on the Iran situation and correlated it to the precious metals market–and silver in particular. Since then I’ve had two different readers e-mail to ask why I’m so sure about an imminent jump in the price of silver.  Here is some useful background:
World silver inventories have fallen to less than 600 million ounces–far below the 1.4 billion ounces that was on hand in 1991. The silver market is incredibly thin compared to the gold
market. That is one reason that silver prices trend to be more volatile that gold prices. For perspective,  consider that together, the two big gold Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) hold around six million ounces of gold. The current ratio of silver to gold prices is around 57 to one. Hence, if the new silver ETF (or multiple ETFs) were hold an equivalent value in silver, that would mean 342 million ounces. That well exceeds the entire world’s silver market inventory! As my maternal grandfather used to say in his fractured Spanish: “No ay ningun possibilidad.” (“There ain’t no way.”) This data leads me to the conclusion that even if the new silver ETF has perhaps only 1/4 the cash value of the Gold ETFs, then the silver market will still explode. Mark my words: Even in the absence of international tension with Iran and other contributing factors, there will probably be a huge short squeeze in the silver market in the near future. The upside potential is astronomical.