Silver is now trading at $45 an ounce. I started buying it when it was $17 an ounce, that was just a year ago. What is causing the enormous rise in prices? For an answer, all you have to do is look at the spectacle of the budget drama. The government was almost shut down, insults were hurled, programs were threatened, and in the end a compromise bill was passed and everyone patted themselves on the back for how responsible they were. As it turns out, most of the so called cuts were really just accounting shenanigans. The vast majority of the cuts were simply funds that were previously earmarked but couldn’t be spent for various reasons. In the end, the compromise cut a whopping 1/10 of 1% off of the current budget. And that took effort!
Since then, the president has gone on to explain how we need to keep spending money and S&P has judged that there is a good chance that federal debt will lose its AAA rating before too long. So, it really shouldn’t be too hard to figure out why people are buying metals. The government as a whole can’t, and more importantly won’t, meaningfully trim things back even to what they were in 2000 (a most barbarous time I’m sure). There are no more safe haven currencies to store cash values in, so people are turning to what people have used for money for all of recoded history, metals. Get it while you can I say, there is little hope of things getting better any time soon.