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 Silver Market Value in 1980
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| Author | Topic: Silver Market Value in 1980 |
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IJP Posts: 326 |
posted 04-23-2005 03:01 PM
  
Would anyone care to discuss how they or anyone they knew in the silver business was affected by the incredible upshot of silver's market value in 1980 (I understand this was caused largely by the attempts of a few individuals to corner the market)? I've heard some say that when silver became as much as fifty dollars an ounce, many dealers of silver goods hurried to get rid of whatever they had that simply wasn't selling. I wonder how much perfectly good silver was destroyed that way. I was hardly born yet in 1980, and I just recently learned about the events in question. Anyone remember something about that time? IP: Logged |
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Clive E Taylor Posts: 450 |
posted 04-23-2005 06:40 PM
The two principals involved (I believe it was two brothers , one of whom was Bunker Hunt ) caused chaos in the market and ,certainly in England , the destruction of much good silver. Even pre 1837 silver was being scrapped and Victorian and later silver , being not well regarded then , suffered horrendously . I seem to remember it happened in the late seventies but I may be wrong. At the time Georgian buckles were usually under a pound each (cUSD2)and were very slow sellers. Scrap value reached well over 3 pounds each with predicable results . Personally I could strangle him as much evidence was lost to us. Clive IP: Logged |
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agleopar Posts: 850 |
posted 04-24-2005 08:00 AM
I was on a working visit to London in that period and the making trade was in an uproar. All the workshops were hit hard for two reasons. If your stock of silver ran out before the prices went down then new sheet had to be bought and if it was for filling an order you were out the huge difference in price. Or if you were making new the price one had to charge was not afordable to most. A great many businesses went under and all the suport trades (Polishers, Engravers etc.) suffered too. Another sad result was the refiners and scrap dealers were melting antique silver that normally hard business peaple who might pull out a good pre WWI piece from a box of scrap to sell, now could not afford to and were upset at the treasures they had to melt. The peaple I spoke to and did business with were to a man and woman really happy to see the Hunt brothers and their Saudi partner finally fall. To hear an east end cockney swearing at the Hunts would have been funny if it had not hurt so many. IP: Logged |
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nihontochicken Posts: 289 |
posted 04-24-2005 11:48 AM
Just a note on the current market for silver. Presently the price of silver is nearly as cheap as it has been in the last five hundred years, hitting bottom only a couple of years ago. Many of the large silver-only miners operate now at break even or a loss, just hoping to generate enough cash flow to keep going until prices improve (much new silver is produced as a by-product of mining copper). In the US, the largest silver market is the COMEX, where most of the transactions are on paper with not all that much physical delivery. Physical reserves of silver appear to be very tight and still declining. There is a strong feeling on the part of many commodities investors that there is a conspiracy between some large dealers, big banks and even governments, to suppress the price of both gold and silver. Assuming it exists, if and when this price manipulation breaks down, the price of silver will skyrocket. So it is not out of the question that another Bunkie Hunt style price spike might occur within the next few years, but this time due to a real lack of supply. Another Great Meltdown is indeed possible. IP: Logged |
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swarter Moderator Posts: 2920 |
posted 04-24-2005 01:02 PM
This topic has come up in several previous threads. Here is one in the British forum. IP: Logged |
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IJP Posts: 326 |
posted 04-26-2005 12:37 PM
Incidentally, one associate of mine actually benefitted greatly from these events. She was only beginning to get into the estate silver/replacement business at the time. A friend, also a dealer, was going to have much of his stock melted, as were others at the time, but he invited her to look through the things (mostly assorted flatware), and select the things she liked and wanted to buy (I don't know exactly what the arrangement was, whether she paid slightly more than melt price, etc). She was able this way to get together a nice array of estate silver, and that incident is largely how she attributes her eventual success. Not to mention the fact that she saved a good deal of silver from meltdown. IP: Logged |
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Dale Posts: 2132 |
posted 04-28-2005 12:37 AM
During this period, the people I knew who dealt in silver or bought for scrap tended to go fishing a lot. One by one, they closed up shop, left a 'gone until further notice' sign on the door, and went into hiding. It was a crazy period with prices flying all over the place. Most people I knew, and myself, took some much needed vacation time. The environment was one in which neither buying nor selling made any sense. IP: Logged |
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nihontochicken Posts: 289 |
posted 04-28-2005 01:05 AM
Due to its basic monetary value by weight, old silver, as opposed to, say, pottery, is more prone to "liquidation" (literally) in times of commodities bull markets. While this may have some negligible effects, such as the extraction of sterling punch press flatware from the world pool, it also has the very regrettable effect of the destruction of important, hand-made silverware. If and when it happens again in my lifetime, I hope to situate myself about half a block upstream of the local liquidator, intercepting the art pieces for the elevated scrap value, assuming I can afford it. IP: Logged |
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swarter Moderator Posts: 2920 |
posted 04-28-2005 12:09 PM
I don't think it has been mentioned yet, but at the height of the madness when it became economically feasible to buy plated ware to remove the silver, a lot of it went to the strippers. I recall, after the bottom fell out of the market, seeing barrels full of plated flatware dumped on the ground at flea markets for sale at 25 or 50 cents apiece. I watched one knowledgeable dealer recover a boxful of unrecognized patterned coin silver from one of those piles. My wife and I recovered 31 coin pieces from what had once been a service for 12 of an olive pattern variant from a small pile in an antique mall at $1 per piece, and 16 pieces from another service for 12 of another pattern. If it didn't say Sterling, it must have been plate, right? Crazy. [This message has been edited by swarter (edited 04-28-2005).] IP: Logged |
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middletom Posts: 467 |
posted 04-28-2005 06:20 PM
During that time at ONC, we would have had great difficulty surviving had it not been for the fact that so much silver was being stolen, insurance replacements kept us in business. As we were then located just down the street from Towle and had contact with a number of people there, we heard stories of so much old silver being sold to Towle for scrap and the executives at the company had their pick of many fine pieces that they then bought from the company at the scrap value. Our business has been permanently changed by the pricing of that period in that the stores with which we delt would no longer stock any of our silver, preferring to order from us only when they had an order in black and white. IP: Logged |
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Ulysses Dietz Moderator Posts: 1265 |
posted 05-05-2005 09:00 AM
I remember this period well, because as silver climbed to $50 per ounce for SCRAP there was a huge rash of burglaries all over the US where silver was stolen for melt. Not only did my church lose all of its Victorian silver, but my own museum was robbed three weeks after I started my career (auspicious, no?). I, for one, am happy to see raw silver at its lowest price ever, because then good old things don't get melted. IP: Logged |
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Clive E Taylor Posts: 450 |
posted 05-05-2005 03:05 PM
Another problem was the photographic industry, which uses (or used) vast quantities of silver in emulsions both on paper and film . I had an idea that the matter happened in 1977 because my wife and I had a tremendous amount of photographic printing on at that time and the price of paper soared to unheard of heights. The silver dissolved in the fixing process is however recoverable and until then we had not bothered as one by-product of recovery is an awful smell! In 1977 we started silver recovery , and had trouble (not surpringly ) from neighbours until we got the stench problem under some sort of control ! Certainly in those days the photographic industry (including X-ray) was the major user of silver and their panic buying exacebated the problem. IP: Logged |
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