Threadly reminder: there is no surplus and hasn't been for 40 years

Hey frens, I wanted to share this with you all. I did an analysis on the "silver glut" that's pushed around here by IQDELET, to see if there was maybe some chance in hell that he is onto something.

I poured through the World Silver Survey reports and manually entered the values in the supply and demand tables that appear throughout their publications. All I did was enter Total Supply and Total Demand, and found the difference (and I confirmed that difference through the report numbers). This assumes recycling was only done once for every ounce reported, which allows for maximum supply. I then plotted the numbers in a bunch of different figures, but picrel is the most relevant to the claims.

The data only goes back as far as 2004 for a couple reasons, namely that, since the publication of the 1995 edition, surplus/deficit balances of 0 were reported, and the 2014 edition was the first report after this that had more exact supply/demand numbers. Earlier editions before 1995 had this too, but I have to look more into whether the numbers are global or not.

The reported annual supply/demand values for each year differ between editions too, sometimes drastically. I don't know why this is, but just to be conservative, I found the cumulative sums for the mean, min, and max values across editions for each year from 2004 to 2023 or so. This is what is charted in picrel.

As you can see, there is clearly no recent surplus. Adding in values from previous reports would not yield nearly enough to put the surplus at some ridiculous amount like 43B oz either.

I also found a paper written in 1930 that shows that, from 1493 to 1927, total silver ever mined in America, which became 84% of the world output, was only 14B oz. Last year's cumulative deficit blows that out of the water.

I'm open to critiques about how I found the values for this chart, and there are some gaps I didn't account for, but I'm pretty sure there is no massive surplus based on the data.

Fuck IQDELET.