Literally true, but not figuratively or financially true.
The United States once held the greatest silver stocks of all time. Over twenty BILLION ounces.
It's gone. It's in the landfills in old busted TV's and such. Broken mirrors. Hundreds of billions of old negatives sitting around.
Estimates are that above ground available stocks of silver are now less than a billion ounces. All of it getting used fairly rapidly. And while your averageproduct that uses silver only uses 25 cents worth or so, it is absolutely indispensibe to the product.
To put it in perspective, there are somewheres between 4-5 billion ounces of gold avalable worldwide.
So an ounce of silver is an ounce of silver. Keep talkin that way. But remember...
It's getting used up. And, unlike paper used in a printing press, it don't grow on trees!
"It's getting used up. And, unlike paper used in a printing press, it don't grow on trees!"
I understand what you're saying about finite supplies. If however silver were to become a rarity, in the uses to which it is currently put, it would no longer be used. If silver becomes prohibitively expensive, less expensive alternatives would come to the forefront for all the uses to which silver were not absolutely critical, resulting in a reduction of a demand and lowering of cost.
Is it possible to get 100, 300 even 500% increase on your investment, even accounting for inflation? Absolutely. Will that ever make you rich? No it wont, unless you were pretty close to being rich to begin with.
Take a look at the silver crash of 1893. At the low (after the crash) silver was selling for .62 cents per oz. That is the equivalent in todays dollars of roughly $12.63 per oz (
I used this).
So if one oz of silver in 1893 had the purchasing power of $12.63 (todays dollars) and today sells for $10 an ounce, that means you only had to wait 113 years to lose 20% of your value.
That same .63 cents invested in the broad U.S. stock market would be worth thousand of times that today. Not double, not triple, but thousands. Such is the power of compound interest, something you don't get by holding precious metals.