A Look At The Gold/Silver Ratio

Sooooo........Nice coins? Good information?

The long term trend is that the silver-gold ratio is increasing.

In ancient Egypt, the ratio was somewhere around 3:1. "Gold was cheaper than silver in ancient Egypt" is something of an urban myth, but it was much closer to parity than today.

By Roman times, the ratio was around 12:1. Mediaeval and early modern times, it was fixed at around 15:1.

Google "gold silver ratio historic chart" for visual info, but it spiked to 37:1 during WWI, fell back to 17:1 by 1919, hovered around 30:1 for the 1920s, jumped to 75:1 in the 1930s, spiked at 97:1 in WWII, fell back to around 40:1 post-war, declined to as low as 17:1 in 1967, crawled back up to spike at 100:1 in 1991, had some ups and downs between 30:1 and 80:1 until a final spike up to 113:1 at the start of COVID, and now it's buzzing around 80:1 again.

The general historic upwards trend is all about the relative supply and demand of the two metals, and since "demand" for both metals is essentially "we'll take all you can give us", then ultimately it's about supply, and that means mining rates. And in general, ever since Spanish colonial times, the mining rate for silver has vastly outstripped that of gold. Gold is "easier to find" in terms of raw nuggets, which is why the ratio was near-parity in ancient times, but the easy stuff's all gone now, and modern silver mines tend to be more productive (in terms of ounces of metal), and there's more of them.

The actual ratio of abundance of the two elements on the Earth's surface is estimated at around 18:1, so presumably, once we've strip-mined the entire planet, that's about where the price ratio will settle.

Judging by chemical analysis of surviving meteorites, asteroids, gold is actually slightly more common in asteroids than silver (though it would probably depend on which specific asteroid you're going to). Gold is rare on Earth's surface because, being a dense element, most of it fell down to the core when the planet was still molten.

The 15:1 of late medieval was very unstable. First the boatloads of gold from West Africa and from Spain's conquests in the new world devalued gold. Then the big stream of silver from mines in spanish america changed it the other way. And there were regional differences. Genoa bankers exploited the difference in rations between Spain and the Mediterranean, and northern Europe and the Flanders. Soldiers fighting the Hapsburg wars in the north demanded gold, Spain had much silver. The bankers took the silver at higher rations. Provided the gold in the north at lower rations. Made fortunes.


Those little mexican coins are very pretty. I have one for the eagle on cactus theme. Have not looked carefully at the 2 pesos but the 1.5 pesos has very good engraving for their size.