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That's how one of the talking heads quoted in this week's Barron's Commodities Cornercolumn describes the state of affairs these days in the market for that other precious metal, silver.

From author Tatyana Shumsky:

"Silver has the worst story of all the metals," says

Adam Klopfenstein

, a senior market strategist with

Archer Financial Services

, citing the bountiful supplies and silver's tendency to move in tandem with gold. ...

Garry Winogrand, Albuquerque, New Mexico, gelatin silver print

On top of the potential for higher interest rates, the silver market has been inundated with supplies of the metal.

HSBC

expects a 3.4% increase in the silver supply to 1.09 billion troy ounces in 2014, while demand will remain nearly unchanged at some 938 million ounces. Part of what's fuelling that growth is that prices remain above the cost of production. On Friday, silver for June delivery settled near flat at $19.718 a troy ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices are down 10.6% off their Feb. 24 high of $22.051 an ounce.

The all-in cost of production for silver falls somewhere between $15 and $17 a troy ounce, making the metal highly profitable when the price hovers around $20 an ounce or above, according to

Howard Wen

, a precious-metals analyst with HSBC. This creates an incentive for producers to continue ramping up silver output, even while prices slip to much lower levels than a year earlier, he says.

Checking in on the metal and its exchange-traded funds Monday, iShares Silver Trust (SLV) is clinging to its 0.4% year-to-date advance as it loses 0.8% on the session. The shares of the commodity's miners have fared better, with Global X Silver Miners (SIL) ahead by 11% on the year (it's down 0.5% in Monday's trading).

Those ETFs' returns sandwich the 7% or so gain in SPDR Gold Trust (GLD) during 2014.

In leveraged trading vehicles, VelocityShares 3X Long Silver exchange-traded note (USLV) is down nearly 4% on the year, including a 2.5% loss Monday. VelocityShares 3X Inverse Silver exchange-traded note (DSLV), up 2.8% Monday, is off by 9.6% year-to-date.