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What should the gold/silver ratio be?Steve Saville Below is an excerpt from a commentary originally posted at www.speculative-investor.com on 22nd May 2011. The price of gold is dominated by investment/monetary demand to such an extent that nothing else matters as far as gold's intermediate- and long-term price performance is concerned. Investment/monetary demand is probably also the most important driver of silver's price trend, although in silver's case industrial demand is also important. In addition, changes in mine supply have some effect on the silver market, because unlike the situation in the gold market the annual supply of newly-mined silver is not trivial relative to the existing aboveground supply of the metal. Given that the change in annual mine supply is irrelevant to the gold price and is not close to being the most important driver of the silver price, why do some analysts argue that the gold/silver ratio should reflect the relative rarities of the two metals in the ground? We don't know, but it isn't a valid argument. Another popular argument that we think is invalid is that the gold/silver ratio should be around 16:1 because that's what it was for hundreds of years prior to the last hundred years. The fact is that due to changes in technology and changes in the monetary system, permanent changes occur in the relative values of different commodities and different investments. For example, when monetary inflation was constrained by the Gold Standard the stock market's average dividend yield was always higher than the average yield on long-dated bonds, but the 1934-1971 phasing-out of the official link to gold permanently altered this relationship. In a world where governments and central banks can and do inflate at will, the stock market will almost always yield less than the bond market because stocks have some built-in protection against inflation. The point we are trying to make is that the ratio of gold and silver during an historical period in which both metals were officially "money" does not tell us what the ratio should be now that neither metal is officially money and one of the metals (silver) has an important industrial demand component. The global monetary system's current configuration dates back to the early 1970s, when the last remaining official link between gold and the US$ was severed. This probably means that we can look at how gold and silver have performed relative to each other since the early 1970s to determine what's normal and what's possible. With reference to the following chart, here's a summary of what happened during this period: a) The gold/silver ratio spent the bulk of the 1970s in the 30-40 range, but broke out of this range to the downside during the second half of 1979 in response to massive accumulation of silver bullion and silver futures by the Hunt brothers.
The gold/silver ratio's performance over the past four decades suggests that the 40-55 range can now be considered normal, with moves well beyond the top of this range requiring a financial crisis and/or major problems within the banking industry and moves well beyond the bottom of this range requiring rampant speculation focused on silver. ### Steve Saville Regular financial market forecasts and analyses are provided at our web site: We aren't offering a free trial subscription at this time, but free samples of our work (excerpts from our regular commentaries) can be viewed at: http://tsi-blog.com Saville Archives 321gold Ltd |
