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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alex who wrote (60515)	11/4/2000 9:23:22 AM
From: Enigma	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116778

You may be right about paper gold - but clearly wrong about the producers' desire to drive the industry into the ground - which feeds into the prevalent paranoia. Some may be caught in a treadmill - as in Australia for example - but that's a different thing altogether. If so much gold is being produced below replacement cost it can only be extremely bullish for gold in the long term - that's why I've repeatedly talked about a long cycle for gold. Maybe we will get some monolithic producer through mergers - but even then it will be hard if not impossible to corner the market - and it would be counter-productive - and lead to government sanctions. More than anything else one has to look at the dollar - to few people here comment on this key relationship.

To: Alex who wrote (60515)	11/4/2000 2:11:10 PM
From: goldsheet	Respond to of 116778

Gold firms keep looking at their own internal economic interest. Increasing production to get operating cost down will make sense as long as they can decrease operating expenses more than the commodity price drops. Example: Newmont Expects Increased Production, Decreased Cost for Batu Hijau Next Year In 2001, the mine is expected to produce between 550 to 600 million pounds of copper and 400,000 to 450,000 ounces of gold. This represents an increase of approximately 20 percent in copper production and 50 percent in gold production over projected 2000 production of 495 million pounds of copper and 280,000 ounces of gold. ``We are continuing to successfully ramp up production at Batu Hijau and as we do so, our operating costs will decline,'' The total cash costs for 2001 are targeted at 55 cents per pound of copper, after gold credits, and are expected to decline to between 45 and 50 cents by 2004 REF: biz.yahoo.com Note: My quick calculation tells me the gold credit is about 20 cents per ounce, which means this mine would probably still be a viable copper mine even if they gave the gold away for free. This means 450,000+ ounces of gold produced regardless of the gold price.