Provided by our friends at Hard Assets Alliance.
By Shannara Johnson – Aug 7, 2017
Unlike its big brother, gold, physical silver is coveted for both investment purposes and industrial usage. Right now, silver prices are in a bit of a slump—in other words, it’s the perfect time to load up on this precious metal while it’s down. Here are some good reasons why silver should be on every investor’s radar.
Reason #1: Silver Is Being Used Up in China’s Solar Boom.
By far the largest application of industrial silver today is in solar panels—and Chinese demand for solar energy is skyrocketing. In its 13th Five-Year Plan, Beijing aims to triple its solar capacity by 2020 in order to combat air pollution and to comply with the Paris Climate Accord.
Amazingly, China is already investing more in clean-energy developments than the European Union:
Source: e3g.org
Last month, China revealed a newly built 250-acre solar farm shaped like a panda—the first of 100 such solar plants planned for the Asian region in the coming years. Displaying typical Chinese efficiency, the solar farm in Datong was proposed in May 2016 and became operational only 14 months later. Over the next 25 years, it will provide the same power as burning one million tons of coal.
No wonder last year was the strongest so far for solar-related silver demand. Leading analysts believe that this trend will continue a while longer—even though Tesla’s SolarCity is getting ready to replace silver with the much cheaper copper in its PV panels.
Specialist consultancy Metals Focus said it expected 2017 silver demand from the solar sector to ease only slightly compared to last year, remaining the second highest on record.
And the supply is finite. The chart below shows official global silver reserves, that is, the amount of silver that is considered to be recoverable from mines—which is only 571,000 tonnes.
Source: Statista
Reason #2: The US Stock Bubble Is Getting Ready to Burst.
How many screaming superlatives can a market take before it collapses? We will probably find out soon.
It seems that US equities are hitting new record highs every day, but the writing is most certainly on the wall. By mid-July, the Case-Shiller P/E Ratio hovered above 30 (the 100-year median is around 16). That is reminiscent of the height of the dot-com bubble and the weeks leading up to the 1929 stock market crash.
One yardstick of the growing insanity is the money-burning tech companies whose shares keep going up no matter what.
Take Netflix (NFLX), for example, which casually announced in an April letter to shareholders that it expects a negative free cash flow (FCF) of $2 billion this year, up from “only” $1.7 billion in 2016.
Last October, the company said it would have to raise another $800 million in debt (adding to the over $2.2 billion it already had), all in the name of adding …read more
Source:: Gold Silver Worlds
The post Solar, Bubble, Banks, War, and Legal Tender: Five Reasons Why You Should Buy Silver Now appeared first on Junior Mining Analyst.