I am not sure about the silver shortage part, but surely will say that these days people are prefering investing more on silver than gold.
I just wondered if there was because I have read a lot lately about investing in it, and thought maybe people were doing this because it was becoming rarer? Or harder to find?
The problem of supply and demand in an industry like this is that it is a long and expensive process to ramp up supply. Naturally, mining companies have exhausted the easiest supplies first, so unless new places are discovered to mine for silver, they must dig deeper (figuratively and literally). There is also the problem that they need to make projections that supply will continue to outstrip demand, or they might be in the position of expanding mining operations beyond the growth of demand and then be in the situation where they've made huge capital investments to increase supply while demand drops and not being able to meet the expense, thus facing bankruptcy. So, the economic forces tend to keep mining companies on the conservative side, which has an exponential effect when demand is rising like it is today. The demand, to a certain extent, then gets met by people selling silver as scrap, when the bullion value exceeds the collectible value of coins, or silverware for example.
