Junk Silver Mintage

Yes, it could. The BIG question regarding PM prices is usually about WHEN and not so much about HOW MUCH. Gold and silver both have gone through long periods when their prices were flat. Thanks to the industrial and investment demand plus the falling mine production, I don't expect that to happen in the near future but virtually anything is possible. The odds seem to favor higher prices for the next several years, if not for longer than that. Not that we won't have upward spikes and downward swoons in PM prices, of course, because we probably will.

Yes, we will. As investors, about all we can do is shave the odds a bit in our favor and be aware of the fact that they are odds and not guarantees. Because of this, investing in things that are most likely to rise in price is about all we can do. That and proper asset allocation / diversification will be our primary tools for good results. As always, though, nothing is guaranteed. Perhaps that's the way it should be. I think that they call that "life"!

Might get there too, buut what wee have to see is the wealth cicles and the time for precious metals is here, there will be something else in the future, but on thing is for sure and history as tought us is that gold and silver will never be worth 0$ like stocks in the great recession thats wy the banksters won because they bought stocks at 1$ or less! Get the point?

@SinceWhen - Your thinking isn't too far off the mark. Certainly, much of the gold that exists today has been recycled for centuries. Also, our planet has considerable gold bearing ore deposits that have yet to be mined.

However, there are more potential consumers of gold today for both investment and commercial/industrial purposes than have ever existed in the history of the world. It's hard to imagine a situation where gold would enter an extended period of oversupply let alone become worthless.

There is evidence that shows at least some of these crashes to be created by bankers who then scoop up assets at cheap prices that they can later sell at high prices. This can be repeated every 40 or so years and can concentrate HUGE amounts of wealth in very few hands over the course of a couple of hundred years.

Indeed so. What I read said that these were British bonds, though, and not stocks, but the action and end result were the same... HUGE profits gleaned at the expense of others who did not have up to date info.

The world economy will thrive, survive, or perish based upon the bond market. It is WAY bigger than the stock market. This is one of the reasons why the European debt problems are weighing so heaving upon both the bond and stock markets. Both stock and bond markets have been super-charged via the leverage of derivatives. If a derivative bet goes bad, it can be VERY bad financially... and we are seeing some of that effect when companies like Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns, and MF Global get into trouble. These guys are literally betting many times the value of their companies in an effort to make obscene profits... which is fine when they win but terrible when they lose.

I'm actually pretty ticked off about bonds. These paper instruments are the primary mechanism that allows governments to spend more than they have... and sometimes WAY more than they have or can ever pay back. They are basically the root-cause enablers of ALL of the debt problems in Europe, the US, and Japan. In spite of this, governments around the world continue to play with this fire and we keep getting burned by it. Will they not be satisfied until we are all burnt to a crisp financially? Probably not.

Of course, there IS a moral to this story and that is to not play their paper games by converting our paper wealth into physical PMs while the paper still has some value... getting out while the getting is good, as it were.

Yes, I'm sure that virtually every person who frequents this web site is aware of the great 2012 Leap Day Gold and Silver Raid. We also know that it occurred exactly at the usual time of 10 AM EST. 50 million paper ounces of gold and 225 million paper ounces of silver were dumped into the market in less than 30 minutes. Consider that this represents about 2/3 of the annual planetary gold production and about 1/3 of the silver production. This is WAY more gold and silver than backs the entire gold and silver paper markets. If only about 4-5% of those buying paper gold and silver stand for delivery of physical metal, the CME, COMEX, and all the bullion banks will be instantly insolvent due to a "failure to deliver" on their promised metals bets. If that were to happen, it would end this paper PM speculation once and for all. It could also do severe damage to the US and world economies via banking collapses. Not a pretty picture for sure but this is the kind of thing that can happen when paper games are played with extreme leverage.