Gold Silver Ratio
Live ratio of gold to silver: how many ounces of silver equal one ounce of gold.
How to read the gold/silver ratio
The ratio is the gold price divided by the silver price: how many ounces of silver one ounce of gold buys. A ratio of 80 means an ounce of gold costs as much as 80 ounces of silver.
It moves a lot. It fell to about 31 in 2011, when silver spiked near $50 an ounce, and rose above 120 in March 2020, when silver collapsed in the first weeks of the pandemic. Under the bimetallic money standards of the nineteenth century, governments fixed it at about 15 or 16.
A high ratio means silver is cheap compared with gold; a low ratio means it is expensive. Silver depends more on industrial demand than gold does, which is why the ratio tends to rise in recessions and fall in booms. The ratio describes the two prices; it does not predict which metal will rise next.
