I want to talk about the deficit, the silver deficit, because it’s talked about continuously on X, Twitter, and many other places about the structural deficit in the silver market for the last six years or so. Certainly, I’ve talked about it plenty of times, but what I want to point out is the gray hair here and a few others, that we were in a deficit from 1990 through 2006, 15 straight years from this point to this point. This chart, by the way, is from the 2007 silver yearbook from CPM Group. That’s the source, so let me give you the source.

If you add that up, which I’ve done, it comes out to roughly 1.5 billion ounces of silver in a deficit for 15 consecutive years. You can also check the price during those 15 years, and it didn’t move up substantially. It didn’t really start moving until the 2011 was the latest peak until recent times, prior to the recent market. Point being is that with that big a deficit, and to see very little price movement to the upside, some, is very much of a head scratcher. The silver institute actually wrote a paper about it, and it’s an interesting read.

You can read it, find it, it’s public domain, and draw your own conclusion. But the way I interpreted it, it’s kind of like, well, yeah, there’s a big deficit, but that doesn’t really mean anything to the price. Well, again, that’s me saying that you’d have to interpret what they’ve written. The point is that if you had that kind of structural deficit in the wheat market, cocoa market, cotton market, almost any other commodity, you would not see the price be stagnant for 15 years, and it wasn’t stagnant. But again, it didn’t move that much.

We do see that in oil right now, as a matter of fact. But there is a mother nature of markets, and you cannot overcome the basic fundamentals of supply and demand do matter. So I don’t want to make a big federal case out of it, but this was a large deficit for several years in a row, and very few people are aware of it, unless you go back into my age and study the silver market as long as I have, most people are unaware of it. What’s interesting, and I think the big takeaway, at least for me, is that why does it matter more this time than it mattered last time? Now, you’ll get a different answer from certain publishers from the establishment in the silver field than you will from yours truly.

But for me, it’s awareness. I would say between 1990 and 2006, there were silver investors, there were people interested in the market, or people that were using it on a safe haven or industrial basis, but that’s only increased substantially from 2006 to 2026. Here we are 20 years later, a lot more industrial usage and a lot more investment demand than there was back 20 years ago. Do deficits matter? Of course they do. Do they matter when there’s more awareness in the market? Absolutely. I’m going to leave it pretty short and sweet this week.

On the weekly perspective, I just wanted to point out that, again, there was this big deficit for that many years. Of course, if you go back before that, you can see from CPM group that if you look at, I guess, 1980 through 1990, that 10-year period, they’re calling this a surplus. To finish off, we all know this very basic fundamentals, and that is, well, if you’ve got this deficit of 50 million ounces, 150 million ounces, 200 million ounces, 100 million ounces, and supply and demand have to meet each year, what happens? Well, the above-down, quote, unquote, surplus gets eaten up.

If you start in 1980, we had, I’ll try to do this freehand, but we had in fine silver commercial bars, 2 billion ounces of silver in 1980. That built up. This amount, as I told you earlier, was 1.5 billion. We took it off to where we were down to probably 500 million or half a billion silver ounces in commercial bar form at the end of 2006. Point being, again, that there’s more awareness, more interest, more reasons to own silver than ever before. Deficits do matter. This time, it’s getting a lot of play as it should, and it’ll probably have a lot more effect than it did 20 years ago.

This is David Morgan signing off, and I’ll be back with you next week with another weekly perspective. The US government debt is about to cross $37 trillion. That’s not a typo. That’s trillion with a T. Tariffs are being used to try and even the playing fields. Global supply chains are shifting. Inflation isn’t going away. And the value of your dollar? It’s quietly being drained while no one is really talking about this. The truth is, we’re living through the early stages of a financial reset, whether anyone wants to admit it or not. And if you’re still relying on mainstream headlines or financial advisors who just tell you to write it out, you could be blindsided when things really shift.

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