Peak Silver

20/20 vision says US silver production could be extinct by 2020...

FORGIVE THE GENERIC title, and boring at that, writes David Morgan of Silver-Investor, but hopefully this and other missives will bring an important topic to light.

Although I could go on and on about the long-term price forecast for silver, that is not my purpose here. Instead, I want to point out what many others have addressed – and it might be referred to as peak silver.

Before we get too far into this subject, please note this topic previously has been addressed by me and several other writers in this space. In fact some time ago, I invited Ted Butler to engage in an e-TV interview with me on this topic, as he had penned an article about what the United States Geological Survey (USGS) had to say about the amount of silver left in the earth's surface.

The same subject also came up during the panel discussion at the Phoenix Silver Summit in February of this year. One of the panel's participants was presenting the "bearish" case for silver, and I brought up the fact that he had a shortsighted view because according to the USGS we'll run out of silver from Earth's surface around 2020.

In other words, if you look at the silver fundamentals with perfect 20/20 vision, the picture becomes clear.

Adrian Douglas of MarketForceAnalysis.com was just recently interviewed, and he commented how "the US Geological says silver will be the first on the periodical table to go extinct by 2020." And Roland Watson, a friend and fellow silver buff, wrote a nice piece on this quite some time ago titled, "Has Silver Peaked in the USA?"

Roland begins the article by stating, "Has silver mine production in the United States of America finally peaked never to recover? Never mind the ongoing debate about Peak Oil; what about the case for Peak Silver in America?

"Thanks to those helpful people at the United States Geological Survey, I was able to download an Excel spreadsheet of American mine production and chart it out. I added the US mine output for 2003 and 2004 from their regular bulletins and the result is the graph below."

Coming back to the Phoenix Silver Summit panel, I asked the audience, "How many of you are parents or grandparents? Is ten years or so really that much time to pass something as valuable as silver selling so cheaply, on to your children or grandchildren? What will silver be worth when reality runs into fantasy?"

Certainly I am not suggesting we will truly run out of silver, but as the earth's deposits are depleted and it becomes scarcer and scarcer, the price will determine the real silver owners. If you were one of the very few who visited my website in 2000 and recall my stating that silver was selling for the lowest inflation-adjusted price ever, you are to be congratulated. Most investors don't buy bottoms, even when the facts are clearly available.

It was lonely in the beginning; Ted Butler and I were about the only silver bulls writing on the Web in those days. Now nine years have passed. Maybe in the next nine we will have huge interest in the silver market, but by then even the blind may be talking about 2020!