Silver news archive — the price, industry and the investment case

Silver news archive: two metals in one price

Silver is priced as a monetary metal and consumed as an industrial one, and almost every disagreement in this silver news archive comes from that split. The investment dispatches, the silver bullion news of the period in practice, argue from the gold-silver ratio, from mine supply, and from the assumption that silver is a leveraged version of gold. The industrial dispatches count tonnes: electronics, brazing alloys, photovoltaics, catalysts, and the medical applications that turned out to be the archive's most durable subject. The two sets of dispatches rarely reference each other, which is itself an accurate picture of how the trade press covered the metal at the time.

The industrial side has aged much better. A 2012 forecast for the silver price is now only interesting as a record of what people believed; a 2012 figure for annual electronics consumption is still a usable quantity. That is the pattern behind the whole restoration, and it is the reason the silver news kept here is weighted toward measurement: the dispatches still worth opening years later are the ones that recorded a quantity rather than an expectation.

Where the 7,500 tonnes go

The headline figure, roughly 7,500 tonnes of silver into electronics annually against about 320 tonnes of gold, is worth understanding rather than just quoting. Silver has the highest electrical conductivity of any element, and in electronics it is used in quantities that are individually trivial and collectively very large: contacts, switches, conductive pastes, printed circuits, and the silver paste in photovoltaic cells. Almost none of it is recovered. Gold is used far more sparingly, in plating and bond wires, but is recovered much more often because it is concentrated in high-value components.

This asymmetry is the reason industrial demand supports the silver price more directly than it supports gold, and the reason the silver bullion news of these years reads as two files rather than one. Gold's industrial consumption is small relative to a jewellery and investment market measured in thousands of tonnes; silver's is roughly half of total demand. The demand split on the homepage sets the four destinations side by side for a single year, with each band's source named.

Where to check this

This page is current writing, so its mechanisms can be checked against the bodies that publish them. Figures inside the restored dispatches stay as filed.

• The Silver Institute Silver’s industrial uses, from printed-circuit contacts to photovoltaic paste.

The medical story

Silver's antimicrobial use is older than the metals trade itself, and for most of that history it was empirical: it worked, and nobody could say why. The mechanism turned out to involve disruption of bacterial iron metabolism and respiration together with destabilisation of the cell envelope, with the practical consequence that silver ions can restore the effectiveness of antibiotics that resistant strains had learned to survive. This is the one subject in the archive where the 2013 reporting is still current, because the underlying science has not been overturned.

Exchanges and margin

The exchange dispatches in this section are mostly about Shanghai, and they are mostly about margin. Raising the margin requirement on a silver contract is a way of making speculation more expensive without changing the contract itself, and an exchange that does it twice in a quarter is telling you that its volume assumptions were wrong. Read alongside the Chinese gold-exchange stories in the gold section, the picture is of market infrastructure being built and adjusted in real time, several years ahead of the regulation that would eventually govern it. It is also why the margin stories sit in this silver news archive rather than in a separate file on exchanges: at the time they were reported as price news, because that is what a margin change did to the price.