➡ Silver has been outperforming gold in most recent bull markets and is expected to continue doing so. The world is starting to notice a significant decrease in silver availability due to a continuous deficit over the past five years. Industrial giants are consuming the majority of the silver, causing a potential supply shock that could drastically increase silver prices. The demand for silver is expected to grow, especially in industries like solar panels, AI servers, and electric vehicles, which could lead to a significant market imbalance.
➡ The global silver market is facing a supply shortage due to declining mine production and increasing demand from both industry and investors. Mining silver is a complex process and cannot be quickly increased, even with rising prices. Investors are buying and holding onto silver, further reducing available supply. This shortage could lead to significantly higher silver prices in the future.
➡ The silver market is experiencing a significant structural deficit, with demand exceeding supply by 15 to 20% annually. This deficit, which has been ongoing for five years, is due to increased industrial and investment demand, while supply from mining and recycling struggles to keep up. Despite this, silver prices haven’t skyrocketed due to the availability of secondary supplies. However, as these supplies dwindle, silver prices are expected to rise, making it a potentially undervalued asset. Silver’s dual role as an industrial material and a store of value could challenge traditional financial systems if it’s reevaluated as a monetary asset, which could lead to a dramatic price increase.
➡ The silver market is under stress due to increasing industrial demand and decreasing supply. The Silver Institute predicts a flatline in demand, but this may be underestimated, especially with the rise in solar installations in China, which require silver. The deficit of silver is expected to continue, potentially leading to a crisis where there isn’t enough silver for industrial use. This could cause a rapid increase in silver prices, making it a potentially valuable investment.

Seven out of the nine last bull markets, silver outperformed gold. So it tends to sort of catch up and then outpace gold. I wouldn’t expect it to be necessarily different this time. You’re watching Silver News Daily. Subscribe for more. Silver is vanishing and the world is just beginning to notice. For five straight years, a relentless structural deficit has been quietly consuming global inventories. And now the buffer is almost gone. Over 70% of above ground silver has already been devoured, not by speculators, but by industrial giants and supply chain desperation. The vaults are emptying, the miners can’t keep up, and what’s left is being locked away by stackers who refuse to sell no matter the price.

This isn’t just another precious metals rally. This is the early tremor of a full blown supply shock that could send silver catapulting past $50, past $75 and possibly straight through the long predicted $100 ceiling. As solar panels, AI servers and electric vehicles rip through physical silver like never before, the market is tightening into a bottleneck that can’t be ignored any longer. So the real question isn’t will silver go higher, it’s how violent will the breakout be when there’s nothing left to sell? Stay with me because what we’re about to uncover will show you why the next move in silver could make history and it might already be underway.

Yeah, so that’s interesting. If you look at the forecast for investment demand of physical silver, I’m looking at the numbers from the Silver Institute again and they see a little bit of growth, sort of moderate growth over last year it was 190 million ounces of coin and bar demand. They see it at 204 million ounces for 20, 25. I think that’s actually going to be once again an underestimate. That’s only 7% growth. I think that if you look at different places like India, China, Turkey, Egypt, and then if you look at, even at the west, the amount that there’s been of sales of physical silver at places like Costco, Walmart, so on, I think that we’re going to see that number is going to turn out to be much too low, about 204 million ounces going to physical investment this year.

What’s interesting too is that if you, because the way the Silver Institute presents their numbers, they, they show total supply and total demand. However, the investment of silver that goes into ETFs is shown outside of those two numbers in terms of the balance. So if you exclude silver flowing into silver ETFs, then the the deficit, the structural deficit that they’re forecasting for 2025 is going to be 117 million ounces. However, and I think, I think frankly that it’s a little unfair to, to not include the, the silver that goes into ETFs, because by the same token, silver that gets purchased physically as opposed to buying ETFs.

I mean, their argument is that, you know, that silver is not consumed and that silver can easily flow back to the market to be, to be consumed if necessary or whatever. Well, you can say the same thing for physical silver. It’s not consumed if it’s, if it’s bought, you know, for investment purposes, it’s purchased and that could easily flow back. So I feel it’s more fair to include silver that goes into silver ETFs in terms of overall demand. So they think that that’s going to grow pretty significantly. They said it was 60 million ounces last year.

They think it’s going to be 70 million ounces this year. Again, I think that’s going to be an underestimate. But here’s the really interesting part. If you leave out silver in silver ETFs, then as I was saying before, your deficit for 2025 is forecast at 117 million ounces. But if you include the silver in. Since 2021, the silver market has been bleeding physical metal at a pace few truly understand. And the consequences are just beginning to emerge. We’re now in the fifth year of a structural deficit where annual demand outstrips supply by as much as 200 million ounces.

That’s not a fluke. It’s a systemic imbalance that’s been papered over by draining above ground inventoriescomex, LBMA, ETFs and private hoards. But here’s the terrifying that cushion is almost gone. According to recent data, secondary inventories have collapsed by nearly 70% over the last four years. COMEX warehouse stocks are at multi year lows. And global ETF holdings have dropped by hundreds of millions of ounces, much of it silently absorbed by industrial users, not investors. What’s happening behind the scenes is a hidden liquidation of the world’s emergency silver supply used to mask the full scale of the crisis.

Industrial giants, solar manufacturers, electronics producers, EV builders have been quietly tapping into these vaults to meet urgent demand, delaying the inevitable price reaction. But that strategy has a limit and the market is now approaching it. Every ounce pulled from these vaults is one less ounce available to cushion the blow when the next demand surge hits. And it’s coming the Signs are everywhere. Inventories that once buffered the market have been reduced to shadows of their former selves. And there’s no replacement coming from mine supply. The silver market has been living off borrowed time and borrowed metal. When that metal runs out, the illusion ends and the real price discovery begins.

You know, early 2021, it just kept falling, falling, falling, falling from about 500 million ounces to about 400 million ounces. So about 100 million ounces got sort of sucked out of SLV alone. As I say, it started to rise through last year. The second half of last year peaked around November or so quickly dropped off. Now, what I find interesting about that is if you think about the timing, that’s when we started to hear about things like that was right after the election in the U.S. that was when we started hearing about the possibility of tariffs.

Nobody knew for sure on what kinds of commodities, other things that these tariffs could apply. And there was concern. So a lot of silver flowed into the US and you see a similar sort of sell off in the silver holdings of SLV in the fall of last year. And that bottomed right around. That bottomed right around the beginning of February. So right around the, right around after Trump was actually inaugurated and then started talking, you know, more about these, these tariffs. There was some clarity, I think, shortly after that. But then the holdings in SLV ETF have absolutely soared again from there.

They were 430 million ounces at that point, and today we’re well above 480 million ounces. So the, the silver holdings, the physical silver held at, at SLV does not move that in, in as much lockstep as the silver price itself. But it’s interesting, if you look at what goes on, you know, ma economically and you look at the silver held in that etf, you get some clues as to, you know, what’s going on and why. You know, you might have significant amounts flowing in and then significant amounts flowing out and, and that cycle sort of repeating.

But, but we’re certainly clearly in a new upward trend in terms of ounces held by SLV since the, since the middle of last year. So over the past years, silver isn’t just a hedge against economic chaos anymore. It’s become the industrial world’s most critical bottleneck. Nearly 70% of all silver produced each year now vanishes into industrial applications. And leading that charge is the solar sector, devouring almost 20% of global supply on its own. But 2024 shattered every forecast. China’s solar installations in the first half of the year didn’t just rise, they exploded, surpassing the country’s entire total for 2023.

All thanks to massive government stimulus. And silver is the backbone of this boom. There’s no substitute, no cheaper alternative. Every high efficiency photovoltaic cell relies on silver’s unmatched conductivity. As nations race to decarbonize and electrify their economies, demand is going vertical and it’s not slowing down. But solar is only the beginning. AI data centers, EVs, 5G networks and advanced electronics are all scaling simultaneously. And they all require silver in increasing volumes. These aren’t speculative trends. They’re government backed megatrends with multi trillion dollar funding pipelines. And unlike investment demand, industrial consumption doesn’t pause to wait for a better price.

It doesn’t care if silver is plus $25 or $250. These industries are mandated to grow and they will pay whatever it takes to secure the metal they need. That’s the nightmare scenario. The market is sleepwalking into inelastic, non negotiable. Industrial demand is now clashing with a supply chain that’s been weakened by years of underinvestment and depletion. The fuse has already been lit. When you combine surging industrial use with rapidly declining inventories, you don’t get a normal market correction, you get a powder keg. So that’s a good question. I think that my feeling is, at least for the most part since this, since the inventory started to come down from early 2021 in, in silver ETFs, I think that most of that was probably the big industrial consumers.

They had to get it. They weren’t able to, they were able to get some of it off of the exchanges and there might have been some private, you know, private inventories that, you know, where we, we can’t necessarily track that we’re able to flip it and you know, sell it to industry. But I do think industry was consuming most of that. I’m not sure that there were that many private investors necessarily, you know, turning in their units of silver ETFs to get the physical silver. There probably was some of that, especially if they wanted to get significant amounts, because that was certainly one way to do it.

But it’s interesting to see that the, the silver that’s held by ETFs bottomed towards the end of last year and that we’ve started to see that climb again. So we were the, the total, the peak in silver held in, in silver ETFs globally was about 1.2 billion ounces. It bottomed around 900, 950 million ounces, I’m going to say towards the end of last year, really, we’ve seen that start to climb again. In fact, I like to look at the numbers from SLV etf, which is the world’s largest etf. You know, it’s very, you know, significant. It carries about half of all of the silver worldwide in terms of ETFs.

And so we saw that go through some interesting gyrations over the last couple of years. I’m actually looking at a chart of it right now. And it, interestingly, it bottomed right around, I’m going to say down June of last year, around 410 million ounces. It quickly ran up to about 480 million ounces. And then interestingly enough, before that, by the way, from global mine supply is collapsing and there’s no cavalry coming. Since peaking at around 900 million ounces in 2016, annual silver production has fallen steadily, now sitting closer to 835 million ounces. That’s a brutal reality in a market already facing year over year deficits of up to 200 million ounces.

And yet the world keeps demanding more. The problem? Mining can’t just flip a switch. Silver isn’t like copper or gold. It’s primarily a byproduct metal, meaning that most of it is extracted during the mining of other base metals like lead, zinc and copper. So even as silver prices rise, production doesn’t automatically respond. The only way to significantly boost output is through long term investment in new mines, a process that takes up to a decade and billions in capital. But miners aren’t investing. In fact, exploration budgets have been slashed, new discoveries are rare, and political risk is rising across key silver producing regions.

In countries like Mexico and Peru, two of the largest global suppliers, labor disputes, environmental regulations and nationalist policies are disrupting output. Meanwhile, the cost of energy, equipment and labor continues to surge, squeezing margins and making marginal projects unviable. The result, A hard ceiling on future supply. Just as demand is exploding, recycling can’t save the day either. Scrap supply has remained flat, offering no meaningful buffer against structural shortfalls. This isn’t a temporary dip in output. It’s a structural breakdown of the supply pipeline. And as the world transitions into a more electrified and digital future, the inability of mines to keep pace with demand becomes a ticking time bomb.

The silver shortage isn’t coming. It’s already here. And without a dramatic and immediate reversal in mine production, the physical market is heading for a reckoning that will have to be resolved with price. And I don’t disagree with that. My, I guess where I disagree with some observers or analysts is that is the price level at which these people are going to be willing to sell their silver back into the market. And you know, these are many cases what we call stackers, silver stackers. And they’re adamant about, you know, buying and holding on to their silver. They’re not prepared to let go.

Many of them will not let go at any price. But you know, I’m willing to, to admit that you will gradually get high enough prices that will, will have them, you know, sell their silver back into the market and, and help provide supply. But I don’t think it’s at 33 or $35 or even $38. I think it’s going to be a lot closer to 45, 50, 60 and $70 that we’re going to see that supply come to market. And so, so, and that’s, you know, to, to, to that speaks to your question which was, you know, what that’s going to do for silver.

Well, I, I believe that we will get this demand met to some extent, at least not fully probably, but to some extent it’ll be met, but at much, much higher silver prices. And that’s where silver needs to go. If you look at these, these structural deficits because these secondary inventories are down about 70% over the last four years and there’s no sign of that ending. In fact, the Silver Institute themselves have said that that was, I think in this year’s silver survey, annual silver survey, they said that they thought that we’re going to see these structural deficits continue for at least the next five years and that we would probably see new record deficits being set along the way because mine supply has just been completely incapable of, you know, bringing out any meaningful new growth to silver.

We peaked in 2019, sorry, in 2016 at 900 million ounces of silver from mining. Today we’re at 835 million ounces. And yet we’re facing bigger deficits than we’ve ever seen. So, you know, it’s tough for the industry, but it’s fantastic for investors. While industrial demand is draining silver from the system, another force has quietly re entered the battlefield and it’s reshaping the market in real time. Investment demand is back. After three years of relentless outflows from silver ETFs and a general apathy in the retail space, 2024 has flipped the script. Holdings in the iShares SLV ETF alone surged from around 430 million ounces in February to over 480 million by August.

That’s not a blip, it’s a tidal shift. Institutional money is starting to wake up to silver’s asymmetric potential. And retail investors, especially the hardcore stackers, never left. In fact, they’ve grown more resolute. What’s most alarming for the market is that this new wave of buyers isn’t just looking to trade silver, they’re looking to take it off the table entirely. Physical stackers are accumulating and refusing to sell. For many, silver is no longer a speculative play. It’s insurance, wealth preservation, and a rebellion against the fiat system. And when prices inch higher, they’re not taking profits, they’re doubling down.

This creates a feedback loop that amplifies the supply crunch. Every ounce absorbed by investment demand is an ounce that industrial users can’t access. And when you combine this with already depleted above ground inventories, the implications are explosive. The Silver institute has forecasted 204 million ounces in bar and coin demand for 2025. But most analysts now believe that number is laughably low. It doesn’t account for geopolitical catalysts, monetary instability, or the growing distrust in financial institutions. We’ve seen what happens when silver catches a bid. 2011 proved how fast the metal can launch. But this time the setup is even more combustible.

With both industrial and investment forces now pulling in the same direction. Silver isn’t just being bought, it’s being cornered. I do believe that, yes. And we’ve seen that historically, multiple times. And I think it’s the last seven out of nine precious metals bull markets. And you can measure them different ways. You know, they could be secular, they could be cyclical bull markets. But seven out of the nine last bull markets, silver outperformed gold. Admittedly, it did it more in sort of the latter half of those bull markets. So it tends to sort of catch up and then outpace gold as it, as it runs up, you know, sort of later in that bull cycle or secular market.

But it almost invariably does outperform. And you know, you know, I wouldn’t expect it to be necessarily different this time. Once again, just before we get going, we just launched the official Silver News Daily Telegram to kick things off. We’re running a 10 ounce silver giveaway. Yes, real physical silver, not a voucher, not digital credits, actual bullion. This telegram will be our new home for real time silver discussions, market insights, collection picks and everything. Precious metals, it’s where the community truly comes alive. Here’s how to enter the 10 ounce silver giveaway be subscribed to Silver News Daily on YouTube.

Turn on the notification bell comment 10 ounce giveaway on three separate videos. Be an active member of the Telegram group and say hi. Once we hit 500 Active Telegram members, we’ll pick one lucky winner to receive 10 ounces of silver shipped directly to you. So get in early. Stay active. For silver, the battle lines have been drawn at like $40, $45 and $50 price levels that aren’t just technical milestones, but psychological tripwires for a full blown price eruption. In early 2024, silver broke through $39 before briefly pulling back a classic bull market consolidation that’s now acting as the springboard for the next leg.

Higher Technical analysts are watching these levels closely because they represent more than just resistance. They’re the gateways to a paradigm shift. Once Silver decisively clears $40 and holds the floodgates open, the next wall is Plast’s $45, a level tied to the 2011 run. Break that and suddenly the market is staring directly at the all time high of $49.95. And here’s where things turn critical. Above plus $50, there is no technical resistance. It’s uncharted territory. But it’s not just about charts. These numbers have become psychological pressure points for both investors and institutions. Hedge funds, algorithmic traders, and even retail buyers are clustering around these targets.

Every price milestone broken draws in more capital, more momentum, and more fear of missing out. And underneath that momentum is a market running on fumes. Inventory is scarce, premiums on physical are rising, and miners can’t respond fast enough to meet demand. That means every breakout above a key level has the potential to trigger a rush, part technical, part emotional, but all re real. This isn’t hypothetical. We’ve seen how fast silver can move when resistance turns into support. In 2011, it only took a few months to rocket from $18 to nearly $50. Today, the fundamentals are even more bullish.

The macro environment is more unstable, and the price suppression mechanisms are weaker than ever. Once silver crosses the $50 threshold, the market loses its anchor and the next stop could very well be $100. So the structural deficit, according to the Silver Institute, is pretty significant. It started back in 2021. I’m looking at their numbers right now. It was there was a deficit of about 80. So again, for your readers to just get a very big overview, the silver market is about a billion ounces a year of supply and demand currently in the last few years has been from 1.15 to 1.2 billion ounces.

So we’re using up about 15 to 20% more than we’re producing every year. Producing or when I say supply, really the supply is about 85% from mining, about 850 million ounces and about 150 million ounces come from recycling. So total billion ounce supply every year, total demand about 1.15, 1.2 billion ounces a year. So this shortfall of anywhere from 10 to 20% that we’ve seen over the last four years and is forecast to be sustained again this year, that’s going to mark the fifth year in a row that we’ve been going through a structural deficit. And you know, Elijah, you and I have talked about this before.

Where is the silver coming from? How can you run a deficit this many years running? And so last year I started to dig into that and I came to the conclusion that especially industrial consumers of silver, which absolutely need their silver investment demand is one thing, although if people really want silver, they’re going to pay for it and probably find it somehow. But the industrial applications in many cases are either very difficult to substitute or it’s irreplaceable. So that’s very much the case in a lot of silver applications. So as far as I’m concerned, industry has been able to tap into these secondary supplies of silver, which, you know, maybe for about a Decade Prior to 2021, we were on balance producing more silver than we were consuming.

And that has flipped completely. So this excess silver had been accumulating in inventories which are mostly at least identifiable. Inventories are the comex, the LBMA and Shanghai. Those are the big ones. You’ve also got private hordes of silver, silver that’s owned privately, which, you know, accounts for probably a few billion ounces as well. So I think what’s been happening is that these industrial consumers have gone to these secondary inventories, the futures markets and even to some extent to the ETFs and have been basically drying down from there. So they’ve been able to access, I’m going to say excess supply because this is above ground inventories that are just sort of sitting there.

They’ve been able to access this supply, draw it down, buy it at prevailing market prices without putting pressure on miners and recyclers to bring additional supply to market. And I think that’s why we haven’t seen silver really truly break out, you know, go beyond sort of this 45, 50 level, which will be the true ultimate breakout. So, you know, that’s where I think the supply has come from, and it hasn’t, as I say, put tremendous pressure yet on the silver price. But I do think that that’s coming and that’s, that’s really, you know, what makes silver very undervalued and perhaps one of the most undervalued assets right now.

And, you know, bodes very well for, for the future, both for the metal and for, for the, the miners that look for it and produce it. Silver’s explosive potential isn’t just about supply and demand. It’s about what silver represents. And that’s precisely why central banks and institutional players are quietly unsettled. While gold has always been the go to monetary hedge, silver carries a dual identity. It’s both an industrial powerhouse and a historical store of value that makes it uniquely dangerous to the status quo. Unlike gold, silver is accessible to the masses. It’s the people’s money. Small, divisible, and increasingly out of reach.

And as trust in fiat currencies erodes and inflation quietly guts purchasing power, silver is being reevaluated not just as a commodity, but as a parallel monetary asset. Here’s what’s quietly unfolding. Central banks around the world are loading up on gold at record levels, but they’re not talking about silver. And that silence speaks volumes. Institutions know that if silver were recognized for its full monetary potential, the price would have to rise dramatically. That’s why for years, the narrative has been suppressed. Silver is treated as an industrial metal, a byproduct, a speculative asset, anything but money. But that facade is cracking as investors begin to question the integrity of the financial system.

They’re not just buying gold. They’re turning to silver as a more volatile, undervalued proxy. And it’s not just retail. Stackers, wealth managers, family offices, and even sovereign players are beginning to accumulate silver quietly off exchange away from headlines. The fear among institutions is if silver reasserts itself as money, the implications are enormous. It challenges the credibility of fiat systems, disrupts the bond market, and undermines centralized monetary control. That’s why this isn’t just a price story. It’s a threat to monetary orthodoxy. And the more people begin to see silver not as a shiny metal, but as a monetary lifeboat, the more volatile and unstoppable the price trajectory becomes.

This isn’t just about market mechanics anymore. It’s about the return of silver to its rightful role in the financial system. And that return is already in motion. It is quite solid and quite strong. And I do believe that it’s very healthy. You know, the last Few times that we were at these price levels, if we look back a decade or a decade and a half almost, things had gotten ahead of themselves and then after that it was in correction mode around, you know, those high 38 or even 30s. So this time we’ve, we’ve gotten there much more gradually and I think this is a clear sign of a growing bull market and much higher prices to come.

But as you said, we, we ran up, you know, 30, 32, 34, 36, 38, up to 40, even in the futures prices. And now we’ve corrected back to 37 and change again. I really think that we’re due for at least consolidation. My ideal would, would be to see a little bit more correction. Frankly. A couple dollars off of the price would be very healthy. That may, you know, take a little while longer, a few more weeks, maybe a month or two, probably not even that long, but that would be the best thing. And then we would probably continue to head considerably higher through the rest of the year.

And what kind of prices do you expect going into your end? So I think that we’re going to see probably something along the lines of, and it’s not a stretch, but $40. I mean, I’ve been saying for, probably since at least the beginning of this year, $40 was very low, likely at some point in the second half of 2025. You know, it was, it was less obvious back then, it’s more obvious now since we’ve all already touched it. But that was my feeling then and I, and I’m, I think it’s very realistic still. I also think that, you know, things pick up and they could, well, for, you know, different reasons, some black swans and some gray swans to come would potentially bring silver to perhaps $45 sometime before the end of this year.

Not sure that it would necessarily stay there, but you know, the all time high of $50 I think is very much within range, but probably at some point, only next year. That’s been my expectation for some time and, and I still feel that way about where silver could be going. All it takes is a spark, a geopolitical flashpoint, a surprise rate cut, a currency devaluation. Any one of these could be the trigger that sets off the silver powder keg. Analysts call them gray swans. Events that are not entirely unexpected, but whose timing and impact are impossible to predict.

We are surrounded by them. Tensions in the Taiwan Strait, inflation surges catching central banks off guard, rising trade barriers, or a sudden loss of confidence in sovereign debt markets. Any of these could ignite A stampede into hard assets. And silver, with its tiny market cap and razor thin inventories, would be the first to react and the fastest to move. But it’s not just about one big headline. It could be a cascade of smaller shocks. A failed bond auction, a major mining disruption, a spike in industrial demand that pushes refiners to the edge. The truth is, the fuse has already been lit.

The deficit is already here. The inventories are already drained. The demand is already climbing. The system is already stretched. All that’s missing is the catalyst. And when it hits, the reaction won’t be measured, it’ll be violent. Because the silver market is not priced for stress, it’s priced for stability. In a world that’s anything but stable. When these catalysts collide with fundamentals, this fragile price discovery doesn’t happen. Gradually, it explodes. Algorithms flip from selling to buying. Retail buyers rush in. Institutions panic. Physical dealers go out of stock. Premiums spike. What used to be available at $30 an ounce becomes impossible to find at $60.

And just like that, the illusion of balance is shattered. The market isn’t ready. But the moment is coming and it may already be too late to prepare. Yeah, so absolutely, industrial consumption has been going up. The Silver Institute is forecasting that this year it’s going to be slightly down from last year, total industrial consumption. But consider this total supply. Last year, if you forget about secondary inventories, just supply from mining and recycling of about, just about a billion ounces, yet industrial alone was 680 million ounces. So 68% of all of the mined and recycled supply went strictly to industrial uses.

And photovoltaics, which is Solar, represents 20% of demand of all of the supplied silver every year. So this one application is 20%. The Silver Institute thinks that we’re going to see solar kind of the demand from solar for silver kind of flatline and industrial demand as well, overall, more or less flat lying this year from last year. I think that’s going to turn out to be wrong. I think that they’re underestimating the demand. You know, I can point to things like, well, you talked about AI and data centers. I saw some numbers recently about solar installations in China.

And because of government stimulus, it’s gone through the roof in the first half of this year and it’s gone well beyond. I think that, that the first half of this year has already surpassed last year, all of last year in Chinese solar installations. And as we know, they’re the biggest producers of solar, the biggest installers of solar. So that really suggests that demand for solar will continue to go up and the required silver along with it. The, the other part of your question I’m trying to remember. Yeah, no, just that if trends continue, it seems like prices have to rise from here.

Yeah, so, so that’s, that’s an interesting point. You know, there’s always this argument that, you know, we’re not going to rise silver. There’s plenty of silver that’s being held by private investors and that they will, so to speak, dishord their silver as the market requires. We are now approaching the end game. The point where there is simply no silver left to draw from the major vaults that once acted as safety nets for the global supply chain. COMEX, LBMA and the world’s top ETFs have already hemorrhaged hundreds of millions of ounces. COMEX registered stocks have fallen to multi year lows.

Global ETF holdings have dropped by nearly 300 million ounces since the 2021 peak. And despite this, the physical market hasn’t collapsed yet. Why? Because those inventories have been acting as a hidden subsidy, quietly feeding industrial demand while shielding the world from the full force of the deficit. But that buffer is now almost gone. What happens when the last ounce is spoken for? That’s the scenario almost no one is prepared for. If the 2025 deficit matches or exceeds this year’s, and all signs suggest it will, the math simply doesn’t work anymore. Industrial users won’t have enough silver to operate at current capacity.

Refiners will be forced into bidding wars with investment firms. Stackers will sit tight, watching as premiums surge and availability evaporates. And when silver becomes truly unavailable, not because of price, but because of physical scarcity, panic sets in. This isn’t some theoretical risk. This is the logical conclusion of five years of relentless deficit. Imagine a world where solar panel manufacturers can’t secure silver contracts. Where EV producers start stockpiling physical metal, and where bullion dealers begin rationing supply at 100% premiums or more. That’s not hyperbole. It’s already happening in slow motion. The silver market has been eating through its emergency rations for years.

Now we’re down to crumbs. And the next time a large buyer enters the market with a physical order, there may be nothing left to fill it. That’s when the squeeze becomes undeniable. That’s when price takes on a life of its own. That’s going to flow into silver ETFs. For the forecast, your deficit is 187 million ounces. And that is a much Much smaller drop than, than is forecast when you exclude it in terms of the deficit. In other words, the deficit will be almost the same as last year if you include silver flowing to silver ETFs.

Now there’s a lot of numbers and, and facts and figures being moved around there and it might get a little confusing but, but let’s just kind of keep it at this. Or to summarize, the deficit for expected for 2025 should be 117 million ounces, which is less than last year. But if you include silver flowing into silver ETFs, the deficit is expected to be very close to last year’s. So I think it’s very significant and I think that it’s going to have impact and I also think that, you know, their estimates are too low in terms of, you know, not being sort of fair or aggressive enough in terms of, you know, the, the investment demand for silver.

Think about this. You know, we’re close to all time highs in gold. Gold is arguably, I suppose there’s different ways you can look at it, but it’s not as cheap as it was. I, I would still consider it cheap, but it’s not as cheap as it was. And yet silver is still very cheap. And if you look at the gold silver ratio, there’s no doubt on that basis it’s still very cheap. You know, UC’s gold start to take out 3500 and 4000 in terms of, you know, these psychological levels, people will really start to pay a lot more attention and they’re going to say, you know, I’m getting one ounce of gold for, you know, $4,000, whereas I can get 40 ounces of silver for the same price.

I’m not even sure if my math is right there, but it’s 100 to 1. So I think it’s something like that. And they’re going to start to, they’re going to start to ask themselves if silver is at, you know, if we make it easy, $4,000 versus $40 for an ounce of silver. Sorry, it’s, it’s, it’s 100 ounces of silver for one ounce of gold at that point. And so people are going to say, you know what, why don’t want it? Why don’t I just buy some silver? And I don’t even have to buy a full ounce like I would have to.

You don’t have to buy a full ounce of gold, but it’s a lot more common anyways. You’re getting, you’re getting arguably a lot more for your money. And I think that that is going to drive a lot more buying silver as well. The silver market is hurtling toward a moment of truth. For five years, deficits have quietly drained the system, while industrial demand has surged to unprecedented heights. Above ground, inventories once thought to be limitless are now nearly depleted. With no new supply rushing in to fill the gap, investment demand has returned with force, and physical stackers are holding tighter than ever.

This isn’t a future crisis. It’s a current one, camouflaged only by the last remnants of vaulted metal. But once that metal runs dry, and it’s running dry fast, the only mechanism left to balance the market is price. Not a gentle climb, but a vertical revaluation that shatters resistance and propels silver past $50 toward $100 and beyond. This isn’t hype. It’s math, momentum, and monetary reality colliding. In a market too small, too tight, and too overlooked to absorb what’s coming, silver is no longer just undervalued, it’s under siege. And when the break happens, it won’t be polite.

It will be swift, aggressive and unmistakable. The coming silver explosion isn’t just likely. It’s the natural consequence of a system pushed past its breaking point. If you’ve made it this far, don’t just watch from the sidelines. Subscribe now so you don’t miss a moment of this unfolding story. And remember, this is not financial advice. Always do your own research and speak to a licensed professional before making any investment decisions. Sam.
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