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Message:: [QUOTE="harrync, post: 3361702, member: 58588"]Commodity exchanges do NOT trade silver. They trade silver Good Delivery Bars -  GDBs. At the time they also traded bags of $1000 face junk silver. Still not silver per se. The only reason the commodity exchange price of GDBs got to $49+/oz was that there was a short squeeze on GDBs, similar to what Jay Gould and such did manipulating stocks back in the nineteenth century. Just like there were only so many shares of a given stock to go around, there was only so much silver in the form of GDBs, so GDBs could be short squeezed. [The refiners were either on strike, or refusing to refine third party owned silver, so there was virtually no way to meaningfully add to the supply of GDBs.] There was a huge supply of junk silver, so there was no short squeeze on junk silver, and even the commodity exchange price of junk silver generally ran about  80 - 85% of GDBs..  I would submit that junk silver was a more realistic price than the GDB price. It was also about the price you could buy or sell silver for just about anyplace other than the rigged GDB price on the commodity exchanges. I was there in '79. I traded on the exchanges, I sold junk silver at coin stores. I even once "took delivery" of a GDB just for the hell of it. There is no perfect definition of the price of silver; just better and worse ones. I think the junk silver price was clearly a "better" price in 1979.[/QUOTE]