Love the sounds of history

History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes, said Mark Twain.

This morning I could hear it.

I did my usual routine of checking the Kitco website to see what precious metals were doing.

It just so happened that the price of an ounce of silver at the moment I checked was $20.67.

Those of an historical frame of mind will recognized the figure at once as what the official price of an ounce of gold was in the United States for almost 100 years ending in 1933 with the gold recall of the Roosevelt administration and the formal dollar devaluation of 1934.

Silver officially was one-sixteenth of the price of gold, or to state it another way, it took 16 ounces of silver to buy an ounce of gold.

Today it takes 61.58 ounces of silver to buy an ounce of gold.

Lest you think silver today is unusually weak relative to gold, it should be pointed out that for 90 years from 1873, silver tended to trade for less than the official price on the open market and government attempts to prop up the price led to the creation of things like the Morgan silver dollar.

Does it mean anything?

If nothing else, it simply means I am listening to the historical rhymes.