Silver Price in the 2000s

The decade started at the bottom. Averages fell through 2000 to $4.37 in 2001, the year of the September 11 attacks and recession, which still stands as the cheapest year in the modern series once inflation is considered. Recovery was gradual at first, then the commodity supercycle arrived: 2004 jumped 36.7 percent to a $6.67 average, and 2005 added another 9.6 percent.

The structural break came in 2006 with the launch of the first US silver exchange-traded fund, which let any brokerage account hold physical silver: the average leapt 58 percent to $11.55 that year and reached $13.38 in 2007. The financial crisis whipsawed the metal in 2008, spiking early, crashing with Lehman Brothers, and still averaging a decade-high $14.99. Even with QE beginning, 2009 held nearly flat at $14.67, triple the decade's opening average and the springboard for the 2011 run.

Before 2006, buying silver in size meant taking delivery of heavy bars or trading futures; the ETF collapsed that friction to a single stock ticker. Hundreds of millions of ounces flowed into trust vaults within a few years, creating a durable new source of investment demand in a market that had been priced mainly off industrial use for two decades.

The timing mattered as much as the mechanism: the fund arrived just as the dollar weakened and the financial crisis revived hard-asset demand, so the new pipeline filled fast. The pattern it set, with investment flows amplifying every macro shock, defined the next chapter in the 2010s. For the decade's prices in today's dollars, see the inflation-adjusted silver price table.