Four Reasons Silver May Be A Better Buy Than Gold

You see the ads all the time, if you happen to watch Fox News. Gold, gold, GOLD! G. Gordon Liddy and everyone else on Fox News just can't stop hawking gold like no tomorrow.

And they've got good reason--it's true that gold has never been worthless. Gold has industrial value as well as ornamental and economic values, too. But what none of these gold bugs is willing to talk about is silver, and that's why I'm going to blast the roof off it today with the top four reasons (that's just to get your attention) why silver may be a better buy than gold right now.

1. Silver is wildly undervalued on a historical scale. Historically, an ounce of silver has been worth, roughly, a fifteenth of an ounce of gold. This means that if you had fifteen or sixteen ounces of silver handy, it was worth an ounce of gold. And when I say "historically", I mean it, too--basically from the dawn of history until about 1900 or so, this was how the ratio played out. But now, it's about sixty five ounces of silver to one ounce of gold, and it's been that way for about the last fifty years or so. Now, when you stack about six thousand years of recorded history against the last fifty years, what looks more like an aberration to you, pricey silver or cheap silver? Cheap silver sure looks like the burp in the universe to me.

2. Silver has industrial applications that make it indispensible. From solar panels to RFID tags to wood preservatives to antibacterial agents, silver has a whole lot of uses past coinage and jewelry. In fact, the VM group in London is suggesting that, by 2020, industry will consume, outright, another three hundred fifty million ounces.

3. Silver is disposable, and is it ever being disposed of. Because silver is so cheap right now, the process of recycling used electronics and the like--as is so often done for gold--just isn't worth it. Thus, there are thousands of ounces of silver just sitting in landfills at this very moment, and they're being buried under stacks of plastic Pampers and the like. Meanwhile, most of the gold ever mined is currently somewhere. Sure, tiny amounts are lost to electronic scrapping, but most of it is in bars and on people's wrists and necks and such.

4. Silver is vastly cheaper...for now. It's running about seventeen bucks an ounce right now, folks, and if it gets back to that historical level, you'll see it go from twenty bucks an ounce to up around a hundred or more. And silver, like gold, has never been worthless. Especially if you stick to the ninety percent silver United States coinage--the so-called "junk silver"--that will always be worth at the very least face value.

So if you're thinking gold, you may want to dial your thinking down a notch and consider instead silver for a place to park your savings.