Markets are made of many people. The seeming exogenous economic forces are real, but irrelevant in the face of the will of the greater mass of the retail populace, as in the end the forces themselves are made by the people's actions, and not the other way around.
It boils down to what people want to do with their money. They have to believe that they can make something from the industrial enterprise of selling mining stock, and/or mining metals. On the latter point I would aver that in this decade or three, it has never been more apparent that fulminating world demands dictates that the business of selling metal is an idea whose time has come. Bumps on the road in getting to the point of adjusting your thinking to the engineering production-marketing phase and concentrating on stories that have reality in terms of being able to produce metals, in small quantities or large will take some doing. Obviously the smart money is jockeying for the property and money that will allow them to do that. There are a few problems. Canada and not so much the US have been sunsetting as real engineering entities in the business of raw material production or manufacturing therefrom. The basic economics and world markets have not been favourable to this raw material rich nation. This is a serious situation, as there are only so many things to do for a nation's economics. You can dig things, or grow them, make things to do the same, make things for people and business in general, or show/facilitate others to do things. Then there is the money and money control game. IMHO, if you lose a component of this whole set of basic activities, then the others start to deteriorate without some offsetting basic advantage balancing. So far Canada's only offsetting advantages that keep it from drifting into third world status are its former glory as a raw material producer, its wealth of materials and energy, and its access to the major markets. Its high labour and development costs and backward thinking governments, growing ever more hidebound and unrealistic, may erode these slim margins in the coming years. Why a country could not gear up to take advantage of the enormous consumer and business demand developing in Asia is a mystery that is soluble only the halls of power where the Ostrich political inertia of backward-thinking, foot-shooting paranoia and stubborn, defeatist intransigence has been raised to diabolic levels of perfection that would inspire awe in the ancient insular fiefdoms of Sui.
EC<:-} |
