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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;NorthKorea, post: 1728240, member: 29643&quot;]To put this into perspective (which would settle this for rational individuals, but probably not anyone who&#039;s considering an investment in copper bullion), here are the percentages of the earth&#039;s crust for some metals we consider bullion, and copper:</p><p><br /></p><p>Silver (Ag): 7.9E-6</p><p>Gold (Au): 3.1E-7</p><p>Platinum (Pt): 3.7E-7</p><p>Copper (Cu): 6.8E-3</p><p><br /></p><p>That gives us ratios of:</p><p><br /></p><p>Ag/Au : 25.48</p><p>Ag/Pt: 21.35</p><p>Cu/Ag: 860.76</p><p><br /></p><p>So, the relative ratio of Cu/Ag compared to Ag/Au is 33.78. So, to answer the question of whether copper can be to silver what silver was to gold, no.</p><p><br /></p><p>Silver bugs argue that the &quot;silver-gold ratio&quot; should be around 25x based upon the relative abundance of the two elements in the crust. This explains why a range of 15-125x isn&#039;t that unusual.</p><p><br /></p><p>By contrast, the &quot;copper-silver ratio&quot; should be around 860x based upon the same rationale. This would make a price range of 500x-4000x within reason. Based upon $100 silver (not calling for silver to be $100 per ounce, but rather trying to keep the math simple), that would imply copper priced anywhere from $0.025-$0.20 per troy ounce, assuming equivalent industrial demand and supply. The reason for silver having a lower than expected (or copper having a higher than expected) price is based upon the costs associated with extraction of the metals.</p><p><br /></p><p>If copper were assumed to have the same extraction costs as silver, we would expect copper to currently have a price in the $0.0055-$0.044 per troy ounce. (To be lazy, I&#039;m going to make a poor assumption that a troy ounce is essentially the same as an avoirdupois ounce and say that a pound of copper would cost the same as 16 troy ounces. I know the assumption is wrong, but it works for the purposes of this argument.) So, we&#039;d expect copper to have a current value of $0.088-$0.704 per pound. Copper currently has a sell price of $3.1725 per pound or more than 4.5x the expected price of copper (based upon the Cu:Ag ratio).</p><p><br /></p><p>So, even if we argue that copper is to silver (today) what silver was to gold (in the 1960s), we would expect the &quot;bullion&quot; value of copper to drop rather than rise.</p><p><br /></p><p>There&#039;s no way that copper reaches bullion status unless we figure out a way to consume significantly more of the base metal than we do today, and that just won&#039;t happen in our lifetime.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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