Silver Dips Below $30

Maybe but silver has actually been priced low in comparison to overall historical ratios. Might be just catching up like many thought was happening last year. Who knows. But all PM are manipulated in some ways by all the Paper issued

Personally, I think silver is a buy until about the $35 mark. I didn't stop and but any on Friday because I didn't want to be the guy who buys right at the top of a possible spike. We are currently at $23 face. I was buying at $19 face just a couple weeks ago. Once we go past a $35 level, I'll switch back to numismatic coins and continue working on my Franklins.

"silver is priced low compared to historical rates". Ummmmmmmmmmmm huh? Let see from before the Revolutionary War to 2004; silver has been priced between $4 and $6. And from 2004 till 2008 silver still averaged around $10/oz.

According to HISTORICAL rates silver is priced about SIX HUNDRED percent over the average. So basically for more than 250 years silver has been at one rate, and now it is at another, vastly higher, rate.

As a nation silver has maintained a narrow price range from Colonization; to Revolution; to the early western Movement; Industialization; The Civil War; the second western movement; the great silver strikes; more industrialization; two World Wars; rapid technological advances; the space race; and cold war; but some reason the last four years have been different?

Yeah....some say there is market manipulation...I say they are correct....some very lucky people are making themselves fabulously wealthy...and "it sure as shootin" ain't the Government.

Apples and oranges. And it doesn't answer the question.

But how about we look at this from a different perspective!!!

In 1900 a gold $5 coin with about a quarter ounce of gold could buy 50 loaves of bread. The bread to gold ratio was then about 200 to 1.

Now a gold $5 coin with a quarter ounce of gold can buy 420 loaves of Bread. The bread to gold ratio is now 1680 to 1.

So you see it is not gold that is over priced, bread is just way under priced. However; we will soon see bread returning to its traditional ratio soon and all of us will be happily paying $8 bread!

You can make a ratio of anything. While true that the gold/silver ratio made more sense and had more meaning when we were on a gold standard; it is no longer meaningfull. It is, by and large, an obsolete standard. You might as well look at the platinum to gold ratio. Which, by the way, is upside down from a historical perspective.

Indeed people try to take the out of sync data point, gold, and then rearrange all the other data points to suit the aberrant rather than have gold seek its place in the norm.

Actually the gold/silver ratio in 1900 was 30.58/1. Gold was $18.96/oz and Silver was $0.62/oz.

Therefore the monetary value of the silver dollar was greater than it's intrinsic value.

With Nineteen Silver dollars you buy an ounce of Gold. The intrinsic value of those silver dollars was only $11.78.

That's an aside. The question was directed at why the sudden change in price from a price range that went back centuries. Why is the current price range the new norm? All one has to do is follow the money. Cause and effect. It is not rocket science. The price in most commodities have gone up since 2004 when the speculators invaded the Commodities market. Or at least those Commodities on the S&P Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI). Interestingly those commodities that are NOT on the S&P GSCI are at some of their lowest levels in years; ala Iron.

It is very easy to see that speculation, not supply and demand, has driven the price of commodities on the GSCI. The same people who have made massive profits on the GSCI are the same ones who have made record profits during the "Great Recession".

It is not about the intrinsic value of Gold or Silver. It is not about supply and demand. Demand is down; especially for silver. The GSCI is nothing more, or less, than the financial sectors form of "Las Vegas". They even call it "bets", because that is what they are. They bet on the price of a given commodity rising or falling.

Look at oil. The pump price is tied to the Commodity price. Note this is not the actual price. BP's cost to produce a barrel of oil is consistent within the given extraction method. It does not change every time the commodity index moves up or down.

So if you were a large Oil corporation and you wanted your profits to go up you simply leverage the Spot Price for a barrel of oil up to justify raising the pump price. Your actual overhead never goes up. It is all paper oil. That is how and why gas prices are where they are at and why Oil companies keep making record profits.

The same thing with Gold and Silver. Except that there are people that don't own much physical pm's so much as they own large amounts of paper/ETF's.

If you were a big enough player you could go long and simply by purchasing enough bets you can leverage the market up and make a profit. Then, since you know that the market is up because of your actions, you short the market and sell. If your frontage when you sell is wide enough it produces a perception of a broad based sell off which causes other traders to follow suit. Which brings your price point down to your sell level and you then take your profits from shorting the market. If you had millions of shares in ETF's you can make millions a day.

See?

I am of the opinion that the "Fat Cats" are working together to manipulate the markets

Right. What I had in mind were the thousands of products that are petroleum-based. Each company selling products created from an increased petrol price would pass on the cost to a company like Exxon, for instance. Although oil companies make great windfalls by speculating in the market they essentially own, the ancillary commodity costs do impact them. That was the only point that I wanted to expound upon.

But with record profits entering their coffers, I doubt Big Oil is complaining.

When 90% of our nation is in the hands of less than 10% of the population, we are well down to path to an autocratic political system with only the dying vestiges of our once great democracy intact.

Don't know about the Revolutionary War days but in the late 19th century, the US silver price was fixed at about $1.29 per ozt., which is why a US silver dollar contains 0.7734 ozt. of silver.