₪ David Pescod's Late Edition November 8, 2007
GRANDE CACHE COAL (T-GCE) $1.33 -0.07
FORDING CDN. COAL (T-FGD.UN) $31.95 -0.65
WESTERN CDN. COAL (T-WTN) $1.80 -0.28
THIS IS STARTING TO GET SCARY!
The Canadian dollar has been on a tear lately like the Australian currency and a few others. Or another way of looking at it, the American currency has been sinking so fast it’s been unbelievable.
The good news is, for all the Canadians who have been looking forward to a trip to Miami, Vegas, California to see Disney, suddenly the trip has become a lot more affordable. Which is the good news.
On the other hand, it’s suddenly become a lot more expensive to operate a manufacturing, mining or oil and gas operation in Canada where your costs are in Canadian dollars and your revenue is usually in American. Your economics have changed dramatically and quickly.
Today, Western Canadian Coal makes a little bit of an announcement telling us just how bad this is affecting the coal business, but if it is affecting coal, you can assume it’s happening in every other business that makes products in Canada and tries to sell in the U.S. From their report, Western Canadian Coal writes, “Since our fiscal year end, we have seen a 25% increase in the Canadian dollar relative to the U.S. dollar. On an annualized basis, this would impact our sales by over $50 million. Charts on many of the coal producers, show that this is hitting many of them at the same time.
How bad can it get? Widely-followed commentator, Don Coxe who predicted a Canadian dollar breaking par years ago and more recently predicted the Canadian dollar hitting $1.10 suggests, “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Well if that’s the case, there is going to be an awful lot of Canadian mining, oil and gas and manufacturing facilities that are either going to have to get leaner and meaner or they are in trouble.
TIREX RESOURCES (V-TXX) $2.40 +0.04
If you’re in the search for minerals these days the quest takes you to many and distant places around the globe for the perfect opportunity. And of course there is always political problems as well as logistical, but surely, one of the most intriguing places to be looking these days has got to be in Albania. Long ruled, almost 40 years in fact by communists/dictators/weirdo, Enver Hoxha, the three and half million inhabitants of the small country were under a totalitarian regime, the likes of which few of us could imagine. But things have changed dramatically and now they are like many other countries in Europe in many ways.
Heck, George Bush recently visited the country and was treated like a “rock star.” Maybe they just needed an excuse to party.
One thing Albania does have is a mining history, although as Bryan Slusarchuk, the President of the company tells us, “it was a little different.” The country has a history of copper mining and so established a country-owned top-down mining concern to develop the copper business and it was a key part of their economy. Ironically, when you are keying on copper, all of a sudden other things like zinc, become quite a problem.
Of the 17 deposits that were discovered in the country, at least on the land that Tirex Resources now owns, nine of them became producers.
The irony? Well the irony is that many of the other deposits were never mined because there was too much zinc in the ore and for a totalitarian institution, they just couldn’t handle something such as that. Tirex has managed to line up an enormous property of some 340 square kilometers and as we’ve mentioned, it had 17 properties, nine of which did see mining in their history. Most of them were of a smaller scale, but Bryan tells us it does show the mineral wealth does exist.
Once again, being run by a national outfit without benefit of modern technology, this enormous district, with all its potential for mineral wealth, never received an airborne survey. Tirex has already taken care of that omission and are currently examining some of the data. They expect to shortly have their first drill into the country and once it hits the country, they suggest it will stay there for a long time. A second and third rig they hope to line up as well.
While this new entrant to the market has attracted a lot of volume recently, Slusarchuk suggests that much of it is coming from European interests as Albanian tend to be in the neighborhood.
I’m sure there are not too many folks in Saskatchewan or Arizona that could find Albania on a map, so Europeans might well feel more comfortable with this story.
Slusarchuk is probably right to emphasize that much of the data that has been compiled on this Mirdita VMSstyle project, comes from communist sources, Chinese interests and the like, that are not compliant with Canadian stories, but he does emphasize what they do have is indications in many instances, of very high grade. The question exists though, whether they have a world-class scale for size or not.
The potential for size, Slusarchuk says, “does exist”.
To see the Tirex video, go to www.tirexresources.com.
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