I was talking to someone about the silver shortage. They asked a simple question: “If silver prices are so high, why don’t miners just dig up more?”
That question stuck with me. Because the answer reveals something fundamental about how commodity markets work.
The truth is: you can’t mine more silver just because silver prices went up. It doesn’t work that way.
Here’s why. The people digging silver out of the ground aren’t running “silver mines.” They’re running copper mines. Or lead mines. Or zinc mines. Silver is just what comes out with those metals.
Think of it like this. Imagine you own a restaurant that sells pizza. But pizza isn’t your main business. Your main business is selling flour. The pizza just happens to come out of your kitchen along with the flour sales.
Now imagine pizza prices triple. You can’t just start making more pizza. You can only make pizza as much as your flour business supports. The pizza is secondary.
That’s silver.
From 2020 to 2025, silver prices went up 533 percent. You’d think mine supply would explode. Instead, it grew only 3.8 percent. That’s a ratio of about 1 to 140. For every 1 percent price increase, supply increased by about 0.007 percent.
Economists call this “inelasticity.” It means price signals don’t work the way they usually do.
So miners can’t respond. New mines take 5 to 7 years to build. Environmental regulations keep tightening. In Peru, social unrest has disrupted mining. In Mexico, tariff uncertainty makes expansion risky. In Russia, sanctions complicate things.
Even if you had unlimited money and government approval, you still can’t bring a new mine online faster than 5 years. And that’s if everything goes smoothly.
Meanwhile, demand for silver keeps growing. Solar needs it. Electronics need it. New batteries need it.
So we’re not going to suddenly have abundant silver supply. Not in 2026. Probably not in 2027. The gap is locked in by physics and geology and politics.
Prices can rise. Prices can stay high. But they can’t force supply to appear through sheer will.
That’s the weird part about silver. Higher prices don’t unlock more silver. They just make everyone realize silver is more scarce than we thought.