The Really Useful Silver thread

Silver, Silver Valley and the Silver Summit !

by Christian Wirth and David Bond

08/03/2005

Christian Wirth interviews David Bond, the American Silver analyst and owner of
www.silverminers.com about Silver, Idaho Silver Valley and the Silver Summit.


Wirth: Hi David, great to have you here. You as a real Silver Bull tell us how you found
your passion for silver ?

Bond: Well Christian, it began in the mid-1960s, when I was a teenager and the U.S. debased its coinage, taking out silver and substituting base metals. The real silver coins disappeared overnight. But there were still plenty of 1957 A and B Silver Certificates in circulation, so I began to accumulate them. These were issued by the U.S. Treasury, not by the privately-held Federal Reserve Bank. My objective was to exchange them for silver. But then the federal government reneged on its promise to redeem Silver Certificates with silver. My Silver Certificates became as worthless as Federal Reserve debt notes. So I have been watching, and when possible, accumulating physical silver ever since.

Wirth: What do you think about the current price of silver ? Which factors do you expect to influence the price in future ?

Bond: Even with two major silver projects set to come on line later this decade, another big one, the Rochester, will I am told be coming off-line. I believe silver will be demand-driven and that its price will rise accordingly. The Third World is gobbling up new technology like mad: you can go to Venezuela or China and everyone is using cell-phones and satellite technology. That means they’re using silver like mad. Silver has no peer as a low-cost conductor. But once that cell phone is replaced and tossed away, the silver goes away with it. Digital has been erroneously hyped as the death of silver in photography, because people don’t realize that this is a zero-sum game. By that I mean is that the vast majority of silver used in halide film is recycled in the developing process, so it returns right back to the market as “scrap.?I have heard varying figures on the efficiency of this recovery, but I believe it’s on the order of 80 percent or better. So if less silver is used by the film-making industries, then less silver comes back to the market as scrap. Silver’s future in health as a biocide, a water purifier, as a medicine, is simply enormous, and that silver won’t come back into the supply stream either. So I am very bullish on its prospects as an industrial commodity, and we haven’t even touched on silver as money, which could be the salvation of the Dinar and the Renminbi.

Wirth: You are living in Wallace, right in the heart of the famous “Idaho Silver Valley? so please tell our readers what is so special about that valley ?

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