Ummm ... thinking back ... it's been over 40 years since i bought & sold silver as an investment / hedge against inflation. The concern back in the late 70's & early 80's was that the U.S. economy might collapse and that the dollar could lose all of it's value. You would be in a pickle if you didn't have some form of currency to buy and sell things with. The idea was that you could use silver to purchase smaller things like groceries and pay for the bigger things like a car or a house with gold.
Sounds crazy, but i actually made a significant down payment on a new truck with gold. As a young fulla just starting out ... i didn't have any kind of a credit history but the owner of the dealership was more than happy to co-sign my truck loan because he figured me for being a good risk.
Back then ... it was common to buy junk silver coins at $ 1,000.00 face. You were essentially buying the silver content which was generally about 90%.
They still do something similar today.
https://www.jmbullion.com/90-silver-...10-face-value/
You don't pay as much over spot this way. Another advantage is that most people recognize US issued coins as being 90% silver so it's easier to do transactions with them. It's often a question with bullion bars. (They might be fakes.)
Anyhow ... i was rummaging around and found a good historical silver chart that goes back 100 years. The nice thing about it is that is it's inflation adjusted to the value of today's dollars. Makes it easier to compare back then to where we are today.
Silver hit it's all time high of $ 142.61/oz back in January of 1980. The price peaks and crashes seem to roughly correspond to US economic recessions. It's high going in and it bottoms out as we are exiting a recession.
https://www.macrotrends.net/1470/his...100-year-chart