Silver Price in the 1970s

Silver entered the decade as a metal being written out of the monetary system. In December 1970, Congress removed the last silver from US circulating coinage by switching the 40 percent silver half dollar to copper-nickel, per the law recorded by the US Mint. The Handy & Harman average was $1.77 in 1970 and slipped to $1.55 in 1971. Demonetization proved to be the bottom: the 1973 to 1974 commodity boom lifted the average from $2.56 to $4.71, an 84 percent jump in a single year.

After drifting between $4.35 and $4.62 mid-decade, silver's endgame arrived when Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt began accumulating enormous physical positions. 1979 averaged $11.09, up 105.4 percent, still the largest single-year gain in the modern series, and the squeeze carried silver to roughly $50 per ounce in January 1980, just past the decade's end.

The Hunt brothers supplied the spark, buying silver and silver futures on a scale never attempted before, ultimately controlling a large share of the world's deliverable supply. But the fuel was macro: US inflation was running at double-digit rates by 1979, real interest rates were negative, and hard assets of every kind were being bid up. Silver's market was far smaller than gold's, so the same wave of money moved it much further.

The mania's climax and collapse belong to the next decade, covered in silver in the 1980s. In real terms, the $11.09 average of 1979 works out to roughly $49 in today's dollars, a level documented on the inflation-adjusted silver price page.