Silver Breaks $70/oz Barrier in Historic Precious-Metal Spike

Silver last flirted with a supply-driven mania in January 1980, when the Hunt brothers’ bid to corner the market sent prices to $49 (roughly $180 in 2025 dollars) before collapsing; today’s breach of $70 suggests a similar cocktail of tight physical stocks, cheap money, and geopolitical angst—but with demand now also anchored in solar panels, EVs, and 5G components, unlike the largely speculative 1980 spike. The move fits a decades-long trend of real-asset outperformance whenever real interest rates turn negative (1940s war finance, 1970s oil shocks, 2008–11 QE era). Whether this milestone marks a bubble or a secular repricing matters because industrial silver use has quadrupled since 1990: a sustained shortage could ripple through green-tech supply chains for years, just as the 1973 oil embargo reshaped energy policy for half a century. If monetary easing and systemic uncertainty persist into the late-2020s, the $70 print could be remembered as the ignition point of a new precious-metal super-cycle; if not, it may echo 2011’s $49 peak—spectacular yet fleeting.