Our friends at VisualCapitalist who routinely produce the best infographics (including an excellent gold series), have released the first of a 3 part infographic series on silver: The History of Silver.
The MUST SEE infographic discusses silver’s malleability, aesthetics, anti-bacterial properties, rarity, and concludes with an in-depth examination of silver’s history as a currency.
For thousands of years, silver was inseparable with history and currency. Today silver is a store of wealth and absolutely essential for modern industry and technology.
Full silver infographic below:
From Visual Capitalist:
![[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]](http://www.kitconet.com/images/live/s_silv.gif)
![[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]](http://www.kitconet.com/images/live/s_gold.gif)
It all boils down to Physical Silver instead of Paper. Lol
Physical silver in your hot little hands. By the way, I checked out the Comstock Loads inflation adjusted price at http://www.westegg.com/inflation/ and it is $9.5 billion, not Trillion. CPI metric used instead of M3, but that is only a metric I use for annual inflation. John Williams at Shadowstats publishes what the government won’t.
Thx Sergio for clarifying the trillion versus billion issue. Those three extra zeros would change the value equation for silver very quickly.
One other point, the history, while very interesting for sure, is purely Western. What of China and India? And international trade with Asia? I assume silver was critical in trade with both India and China.
One other footnote, I have read the Brits were rapidly depleting their silver reserves with trade with China – most notably the tea trade. To offset the depletion the Brit tried various imports to pry open trade and finally settled on the illegal importation of opium. This of course, led to the Opium Wars.
Excellent historical on silver – one last thought – citations or book recommendations on the topic.
And yet nearly every country and civilization boogered up the value of their silver currency by diluting, depreciating or devaluating it. Thus their countries fell on hard times.
So the dollar was sort of named after the daalder. I always wondered where the word came from.
Nice presentation!
Ted Butler would disagree with the info-graphic. From the Butler newsletter… I hope he doesn’t mind me sharing this tidbit.. Ill turn this into an advertisement: Subscribing to butler will get you these wonderful insights. http://www.butlerresearch.com/
“When I started writing for Investment Rarities twelve years ago, one of my themes was that there was less silver inventory in the world than gold. While many have come to accept this statement, the vast majority still find that silver couldn’t possibly be rarer than gold, given that gold is more than 50 times the price of silver. It’s not just the price ratio alone that makes it impossible for someone to believe silver is rarer than gold; there is a much longer actual history when gold was rarer than silver. In fact, as recently as 70 some-odd years ago, gold was much rarer than silver throughout the world. Just before 1940, there were 10 billion ounces of silver bullion in world inventories and 2 billion ounces of gold. Most of both metals were held by governments, with the US Government alone holding nearly 6 billion silver ounces. Since then, world silver bullion inventories have declined by 9 billion ounces, while total gold holdings (bullion and other forms) have grown to 5 billion ounces. Let me repeat that. In 1940 there were 10 billion oz of silver and 2 billion oz of gold; today there are a little over one billion oz of silver (bullion) and 5 billion oz of gold (bullion plus other forms). In 1940 the US Government held 6 billion oz of silver; today it holds zero.”
Gold is not more rare than Silver, Silver is more rare than Gold!
Depends what you mean by rare. In nature there is significantly more silver to be found than gold, somewhere in the neighborhood of 18:1. However, there are no longer any above ground hoards of silver. Gov’ts and central banks have divested themselves of their historic stockpiles of silver and what is used in manufacturing doesn’t get recycled because it’s not profitable.
Ted Butler is a GEM, PERIOD!
Remarkable illustration. Hope you can take that to the bank.
Much of the European Silver including New World plundered Silver ended up in China. So our pals The British introduced and crushed the Dynasty genocide ded ly with Opium.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
Yeah, they forgot to mention all this silver “discovery” was discovered in the Aztecs hands. Early liberation.
Idaho Silver that is a fascinating bit of information. It is one of the pivotal events of the last 3 centuries. The balance of trade shifted heavily to China and India as they provided enormous amounts of highly prized trade goods to the west. Those goods were paid for in silver. The British Empire realized their silver was going east. How to resolve this movement of money to China? Get them addicted to Opium. Thus began the Opium Wars. And the silver flowed back to the BE and left China is terrible shape. It’s no small wonder why they have a real and active dislike and mistrust of the round eyed barbarians.
Fast forward. We have sent $3 trillion of unbacked FIAT to purchase oh-so valuable Chinese goods, aka Walmart specials. They have turned the tables this time. They are using our paper money to buy or otherwise bring such large amounts of gold and silver that the world has never seen. And this from the country that invented paper money. The consumate irony is not lost. In a way they have stood by and watched the West use one of their own inventions, paper money, to create wasteage and inflation while they use the self same currency from their multi trillion currency reserves to buy up the west’s precious metals.
I won’t take sides on this. It’s just an incredible irony to me. And this is not to say China is not embarking on trillion dollar QE printing, trying to stimulate their flagging economy and hollow enterprises. The political class is so incredibly corrupt that in a recent article it was noted that the top 70 members of the political elite each increased their individual wealth on average by $1 billion USD during their reign. But as the saying goes. Those who got’s the gold makes the rules’
Kind of funny; kind of!
And the Chinese are buying up silver and gold mines at record rates.
Karma is on China’s side this time! Once the Western’s power is collapsed, China will reintroduce the sound money currency which will make gold and silver’s prices go back to their historical purchasing power.
Excellent infographic. If you still don’t like and get silver after seeing it, then you’re surely full of it.
Neat graphic – thank you for putting it up.
I really like when information are represented like that because it allows to understand even better and it attracts you to read thanks to the pictures with it. It is amazing that silver’s price is still low even with all the low silver that it was ever mined. I’m looking forward to see the copper’s version of that info!