Silver: Room for Growth

Maloney: I buy coins and bars ... I stay away from all collector coins. But going back to the ETFs ... during the market crash of 2008, gold and silver followed the markets for a little while, [and] that's basically due to the ETFs and people having futures on their trading platforms. When they had to get liquid because of margin calls during that crash, they dumped everything including their gold, which was just paper gold. So gold fell in price along with the markets, but about half way down it diverged. Gold bottomed in November when the markets didn't bottom until March when gold peaked. So gold turned around and did what it was supposed to do. It was the safe haven, and it rose when the markets were crashing, and it peaked exactly when the markets bottomed.

Maloney: Also, the real physical free market gold and silver diverged from the spot price about halfway down. And it turned around because there were tremendous shortages that happened last year ... there are some items that [were] very hard to get. [For example], the price of silver eagles on eBay(EBAY) was $35 each when silver's price was $9 on [the] futures market. I'm expecting that to happen in a currency crisis. You could see the spot price go south while the real price ... goes north. If you're sitting on the ETFs like GLD(GLD) and SLV(SLV), you could be watching your investment go down while anybody holding actual physical might be making enormous gains.

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