the gold report interviewed eric coffin. these are his thoughts on silver:

TGR: Let's talk silver. We've been hearing more and more about silver being undervalued relative to gold or oil. What do you see on a macro basis there?

EC: It is certainly true that the gold-silver ratio has widened quite significantly recently. Silver hasn't really followed gold in the last couple of moves. For all its investment appeal, silver to a much larger extent than gold is really an industrial metal. About half of its demand is industrial, after all, and I think that does hold things back.

Another way silver is unlike gold is that there are a lot more gold mines that are just, well, gold mines. There are very few silver mines that are just silver mines. Most silver mines are actually silver-based metal mines. If somebody looks at a three-year chart for copper or zinc or lead, they think this stuff really crashed. If you look at a 10-year chart, they got cut in half or went down by two-thirds, but the moves down last year weren't nearly as large as it has been in the past. And I think one of the effects of that is a lot of the marginal poly metallic producers are still hanging in there by their fingernails. So that silver production is still coming into the market; whereas, in a "normal" cycle, there's probably 50 small- to medium-sized mines in Mexico that would have shut down by now that haven't this time. I think that's part of it. I think the main thing, however, is just that it's a more industrial metal. More of its usage is going into the manufacturing sector and we all know what that looks like right now.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/153734-eric-coffin-stick-with-gold-exploration-stories-that-work?source=yahoo