What the gold-silver ratio measures, how it was once fixed by law, and why observers still track it today.
Divide the gold price by the silver price and you get a single number that people have argued about for four thousand years. The gold-silver ratio is part history, part market gauge, and entirely fascinating, so long as you read it as a record rather than a signal.
The gold-silver ratio is simply how many ounces of silver equal one ounce of gold at current prices. Gold at $2,400 and silver at $30 makes a ratio of 80. It moves every minute both metals trade, and you can compute it live off our markets page any time you like.
For most of monetary history the ratio was not discovered but declared. Ancient states pegged it near 12 or 13 to 1; the U.S. Coinage Act of 1792 fixed it at 15 to 1; France’s bimetallic system ran at 15.5. Whole national monetary systems balanced on that declared number, and every time market reality drifted from decree, one metal fled circulation, arbitrage doing its patient work against the law.
The Coinage Act of 1873 ended free silver coinage in America, demonetizing the white metal in a stroke its partisans denounced for a generation as the Crime of ’73, the political earthquake that later birthed the Morgan dollar through the Bland-Allison Act. Once decree gave way fully to markets, the ratio wandered as it pleased: documented modern history spans from the teens at silver’s 1980 spike to above 120 in the turmoil of early 2020, one of the widest readings ever recorded.
Some collectors watch the ratio as context, noting where it sits against its own long history when deciding which metal to add next. That is a description of documented behavior, not a recommendation: the ratio has no floor, no ceiling, and no schedule, and its only honest promise is that it will keep moving. As a lens on four millennia of monetary history, though, it has no equal.