Is this range possible? It sure seems unlikely, but what if it did happen and you couldn't afford it to happen :/ source indexmundi.com
Anything is "possible". The question should be is it "probable", which I don't think it is. It's more probable to sit on a price that is the average between mid 2005 and mid 2009.
I don't think it will get that low. There's about an 80% chance that we've hit the bottom, or it will be soon. Either way, i'm still buying.
Yeah sure, 80% why not? Random numbers, love it. The buying-no-matter-what-happens mentality, love it.
If we new what the prices would do we would all be retired millionaires. It is all just speculation in the end.
the great supply/demand debate will be an issue here. At $10usd I think you'll see a spike in investment, industrial and jewellery silver and even some of the byproduct producers and a pretty big proportion of the primary producers will be in trouble or out of business and I don't know about you but I don't see many people bringing in scrap to sell at that price or bothering to recover much silver from electronics. The market is a crazy place and it could go there or lower but i don't think it's likely and I certainly don't think it's at all likely to stay there for any amount of time.
I deal with some of the biggest e-waste recyclers in aust' and never once has there been even one mention of silver. the little silver in e-waste is a by-product left over when they get the gold. platinum, palladium and copper. Silver in electronics is very minimal, the only people that chase silver in electronics are those that want to recover it for their own hobby. Gold is where it's at, the value of e-waste is determined by the gold content only. Just take in a load of keyboards and see what they pay, they don't, they will charge you to recycle it keyboard mylars are relatively simple to extract the silver but even when silver was $40 oz it's still not enough to bother. I think people are confused by chinese whispers that is everything silver. one guy says he got an ounce of silver from mylars, next guy says you can get heaps of silver from mylars, next guy puts up an article in a blog and says oh man there's silver in mylars, the next blogger has this fantasy story in his head and say's that there's so much silver in electronics no wonder it's running out. silver stackers read these blogs as if their gospel, and that's how the story always goes. people want so much to believe silver's running out and there's so many uses for it. it's not really true, the amount of silver in electronics or solar panels is so minimal it's simply not worth recovering on it's own. If you want to make money from silver then paint yourself in it and stand still out front of a shopping centre, like marcel marceau, that's will get you some cash but if you believe silver will make you rich, hah! most likely you will never be rich as your forgetting what makes people rich from silver, mining it.
There are a ton of practical and essential uses for it. That part is completely true. It's not that the amount of silver is "so minimal", it's a simple economical equation of recovery vs silver cost. You should have said "dollar amount", not just "amount". Sorry to be pedantic Silver is approaching two orders of magnitude less cost than gold for a given weight. So It's worth recovering the gold, but not the silver.
There may be a ton of practical uses but paper, steel and timber have so many practical uses too, what makes silver so special because it has uses also? why would silver go to the moon and not water? people need fresh water to survive. silver may have more medical uses today but so does stainless steel, copper etc. I'm only talking about electronics really, and that silver in electronics is minimal compare to other metals. The "amount of silver" recoverable is the same as the "amount of money" you can sell that silver for. if you recover 1 kg of silver from 10 tonnes of e-waste then that 10 tons of e-waste has $600 worth of silver. so a refiner will take that silver and sell it but would never buy e-waste based on silver, just like miners it's a by-product, a bonus for having invested in the equipment to extract it. but where does that silver go? back on the market, so much for it being used, silver is just being borrowed, it get's returned over & over. So it don't matter if they found a super use for a lot of silver, millions of tons of silver every year, big deal, it comes back so it can never run out. I'm not saying silver won't rise in price but I think a lot of people are disillusioned by the rubbish they read in those blogs, chinese whispers.
Of course it's possible. It was there for 23 years (give or take) in a row. Why on earth would it be any higher now? Silver is still mostly only the byproduct of other metals' mining, so the costs of production are about the same they were in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. It's not only possible. It's even very likely.
What if USD $15 -$16 is the new normal and we spend the next 10 years arguing furiously that silver is about to go to either $9 or $50?
Court Jester would beg to differ - he'd claim they were going <---------------- SIDEWAYS ----------------->
I don't understand, your saying it's not economical to recover but it keeps coming back and being recycled? At $9 I don't think you'll see much of that at all, plenty of industrial silver going thrown into land fills. I've personally seen industrial silver recovered but only from really obvious sources, not e waste, at $9 I don't think you'll see much old jewelry coming back into to the system either.
Isnt that exactly what stacker's do and profess to do on a stakers forum? Flippers and would be if could be bullion dealers on the other hand, well what can I say!
I have a friend who made a bunch of money in the 80-'s from recycled silver - not millions, but thousands or tens of thousands. It was from silver recovery at x-ray labs - mostly dentists as I recall, as hospitals had a system he couldn't get into. He lived in the sticks, a lot of driving, not a lot of labs. He did other metal recycling, so made good money over the long haul. Now x-ray is all digital, as with most photography, but silver was sub $9, not considering inflation. All it takes is one source with a simple extraction process. Maybe those days are gone forever, I do not know.
You might be surprised how much film is still used in xrays, they just get processed and scanned straight away then filed away. I saw someone on ebay selling like 12kilos of old films, they said they are apparently 2% silver so that's 240 grams of silver, they wanted spot for it. No takers I probably glow in the dark from all the xrays over had, I probably have half a kilo in silver in all the dozens and hundreds of xrays I have.
