Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Silver to ride high?

Jason Hommel, in this 2 August report on SilverSeek.com, points out that, because of its industrial uses, silver is actually more scarce than gold.

He confirms my recent mathematical estimate that gold "ought" to equate to "$45,000/oz. to fully back all the M-3 created money supply", and repeats the market-manipulation theory:

...we have strong evidence of government manipulation in the gold market that has been going on since the 1990s. It is strongly suspected that the world's central banks have sold about one-half of their combined "reported" 33,000 tonnes (1 billion ozs.) of gold into the market to depress prices. Were it not for this selling, the gold price could well be $2,000 to $3,000 now!

He's predicting silver at $8,000 an ounce within 15 years - mostly because of hyperinflation, rather than real appreciation. In the nearer future, he thinks:

I see silver easily at $30 by early next year. Gold should be over $1,000 maybe $1,200.

That's something we'll be able to test more easily.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

While I like silver as a precious metal, I don't buy the "more scarce than gold" argument. The fact of the matter is that in terms of parts per billion, gold is much much more scarce than silver.

If you want to play the demand side of the model, you could make the industrial use case for other metals like nickel, etc., which are in short supply and high demand.

I like your silver and gold targets. I see gold at new highs by year end, but I'm not going to make price targets.

Sackerson said...

Hi Matt

The silver price is Hommel's prediction - I'm using colour rathe than speech marks to indicate quotation - perhaps I should use both.

I take your point on other industrial metals, and I don't pretend to be an expert - my comments are more to do with the flimsiness of our currencies, which is exposed by the commodity markets.

Interesting to see the Dow slip further and still have gold drop $5. Silver has dropped about half as fast as gold - maybe it's less susceptible to government manipulation by selloff?