Name: Why Silver Prices Are Soaring
Uploaded: 2025-12-02T18:02:04.000Z
Duration: 13 min 5 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

In the past 50 years, the price of silver has spiked just three times.

Participle clauses

First in January 1980, when two brothers tried to corner the market, amassing a third of the world's silver supply.

Basic passive voice

The second time came in 2011 during the US debt ceiling crisis, when silver, alongside gold, was embraced as a safe haven asset.

Silver reached an all time high of $53 in October 25th.

That's been a 78% rise since the start of the year.

What isn't necessarily so visible is there was no available metal left in London.

Some people were having to transport silver by plane rather than on cargo ships.

Silver is often nicknamed the devil's metal among traders because of its volatility.

Yet unlike gold, silver is not just an investment asset.

It is becoming increasingly crucial to the world around us.

Silver crosses over that bridge between precious and industrial metals.

And the way technology is going on, it's got some great use cases as we move into a more electrified world.

So what caused silver prices to peak and what does it say about our reliance on this precious metal?

What do Indian farmers, high security London vaults and solar panels have in common?

these three forces helped push the price of silver to a 14 year high.

On October 17, 2025, silver traded at $54.47 per troy ounce, a 72% rise year on year.

But first, let's rewind to the start of 2025 to understand why the silver price had been lurking around about $30 to $35 an ounce ban for first half of this year.

Gould gave it a little bit of its own buoyancy to start with.

But more importantly is that word again, tariffs.

In April 2025, US President Donald Trump announced a sweeping set of tariffs as part of his Liberation Day.

What we saw after Liberation Day was that the gold price spiked.

Silver actually kind of went down a little bit.

And if you're looking at the gold silver ratio that spiked to above 100 and previously, that's been a big signal that silver's likely to outperform gold.

The gold silver ratio, the price of gold divided by the price of silver, serves as an indicator for investment and market trends.

It reflects how many ounces of silver are needed to buy one ounce of gold, helping investors gauge when to buy or sell.

A low ratio means gold is relatively cheap, while a high ratio indicates silver is undervalued and likely to rise.

And in April 2025, the ratio reached a historic high.

Gold and platinum were exempt from the tariffs because they were deemed as essential to the US economy.

But silver wasn't on the critical minerals list at the time, creating uncertainty about what would happen if it were.

The risk managers in financial and industrial entities did not want to let any metal go out of the States for fear that it might come back in at 35% higher, for example.

So they'd been sitting on it and that was starting to cause a little bit of tightness.

India is the world's largest consumer of silver.

Every year it uses about 4,000 metric tons, mostly for jewelry, utensils and ornaments.

Silver is also seen as an affordable investment option in a country where about 55% of the population depends on agriculture for their livelihood.

So we had a good monsoon and a good harvest, which means that farmers are coming back into the market with a fair amount of disposable income.

And farmers don't really like the banks very much.

latterly, silver, tend to be the first port of call when they've got the harvest in the monsoon.

Harvest season in India typically ends in late September or early October.

And that time frame coincides with India's biggest public holiday, Diwali, a five day festival of lights celebrating prosperity and good fortune.

Diwali is the time of year when millions of Indians will buy gold for gifts.

But this year we've seen a real rapid pivot into the silver market.

As preparations for the festival were underway, the price of silver in India rose sharply, reaching a record high of 170,415 rupees a kilo, an 85% rise since the start of the year.

Indians make early investments ahead of the wedding season.

And the buying of gold and silver is a tradition which is focused around positivity and prosperity.

This year, the high prices and lower volumes that we saw in gold meant people rapidly pivoted towards silver.

So much so that we saw shortages in Indian silver refineries.

But 80% of India's silver supply is imported.

And while the UAE and China are increasingly supporting that demand, the UK is traditionally India's largest supplier.

And meeting that demand became a challenge.

Since 2022, London's vaults have emptied rapidly.

In June that year, the London Bullion Market association held about 31,000 metric tons of silver.

By March 2025, the volume had fallen by around a third to about 22,000 metric tonnes, its lowest point in years.

You can get hold of them reasonably quickly from the raw mint.

But I've asked about silver and it's at least a two week timescale from when you order it.

In October, the squeeze was such that traders had to pay much higher borrowing costs to close their positions.

At one stage, to borrow overnight was costing 200% on an annualised basis.

If you look at the London Bullion Market association website, that will show x 1000 tonnes in volts.

But a lot of that is allocated for ETFs, so it's not necessarily a free float.

ETFs can track stocks from a single industry, a set of companies or commodities.

The latter are also known as ETCs or Exchange Traded Commodities.

And many silver ETCs are guaranteed by the physical metal.

You could just buy physical metal directly, but then you've got to buy it, store it, insure it.

ETFs in silver have a higher component of retail investors than they do in gold.

And retail investors tend to buy and hold and not necessarily trade out.

Gold experienced its own rush in 2025 with a price surging past $4,000 an ounce, its biggest rally since the 1970s as investors search for a safe haven.

So why have people turned to silver rather than jump on the gold bandwagon?

Silver's a harder market to understand than gold.

At times it's less covered by banks and by research.

Silver is only about a tenth the size of the gold market, and

that short squeeze obviously sort of caught a few investors by surprise.

It's deemed sometimes to be called the poor man's gold, but

that is one of the reasons why it tends to be more volatile as well.

People are more likely to buy on a whim, whereas gold has a history of an allure.

If you can't afford to buy into the gold market because of the price of gold at the moment, then what's your alternative?

Your alternative is to go and buy silver.

The idea of gold being a store of value goes back centuries, if not millennia.

It's always been there, something that has backed currencies and particularly reserve currencies for years.

It's a much smaller market, so it can be more volatile.

Gold and silver obviously, as precious metals, have always been seen as a great diversifier for investors portfolios.

And I think this year we've obviously got a lot of geopolitical tension.

We've seen the dollar depreciate, there's trade wars, there's tariffs, we're seeing a whole broader Spectrum of investors coming in, hedge funds, central banks, retail investors as well, and

that's really driven the price of these precious metals higher.

Throughout history, silver's shine has also attracted gamblers, driving its levels to nearly as high as today.

As of around about the middle of 1978, the Hunt brothers, who were the sons of the oil tycoon, they wanted to try and show their dad that they could be as clever as he was.

And they decided the way to do it was to corner the silver market.

Then we had sort of 2011 post financial crisis.

There's a couple of themes here that are continuous.

The concern about the dollar, concern about inflation, concern about the US credit rating.

So in 2011 we had a downgrade of the US from AAA by S and P, which coincided with very low rates and also quantitative easing.