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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Find all sorts of supply and demand figures that are not correlated with the price of silver, confirming this data is incomplete.Strangely, in 1992, The Silver Institute published complete data on above-ground silver, disclosing above-ground volumes to be an order of magnitude higher than current “identifiable above-ground stocks,” but it stopped doing that.To learn more about the above-ground stock of silver, I reached out to the United States Geological Survey (USGS). I asked how much silver has been mined throughout history, and how much of that has been lost. They replied 1,740,000 tonnes of silver had been dug up by 2017, of which 7 to 10 % has been lost. Based on their numbers, I’ve computed that 1,616,805 tonnes were still with us by late 2018.I also found a spreadsheet on the USGS website with silver mining statistics going back to 1900. With the data at my disposal, I could reverse engineer the total above-ground silver stock from 1900 through 2018. See the chart below:One can argue that because of the use of silver in industrial products since the late 19th century, much of above-ground metal is in industrial products. And I agree. So, how much silver is in bullion, coin, jewelry, and silverware form, and how much is in industrial products?To find out, I turned to the CPM Group Silver Yearbook 2019. The above-ground volume of silver disclosed by CPM Group is in line with the numbers from USGS. CPM Group estimates that by 2018, there were a little more than 1.7 million tonnes above ground, although to them, it’s unknown how much of that has been lost. Luckily for us, we have an estimate on how much has been lost from USGS.CPM Group’s breakdown of above-ground silver is shown in the chart below:Not displayed in the chart above, but CPM Group discloses “inventories” to be roughly 90,000 tonnes, which is more or less what the Silver Institute discloses as “identifiable above-ground stocks.” CPM Group discloses “inventories” to consist of “reported inventories” (exchange vault inventory, ETPs, etc.) and “unreported inventory” (i.e., estimated U.S. depositories and private holdings), and “unreported bullion and coins” (estimates for which they rely on industry sources and historical data).Most important, we can see in the chart, based on CPM Group’s data, there are nearly 800,000 tonnes of silver in “jewelry, decorative, and religious” forms, and roughly an equal tonnage in industrial products.Circling back to the
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