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

To: goldsheet who wrote (66219)	3/20/2001 8:48:14 AM
From: russwinter	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116758

I'm a big proponent of African exploration and mining and own quite a few names there. Tanzania, Ghana, and Mali are good stable regime bets with excellent deposits. Certainly if places like the Congo ever get squared away, some of the supply issues we debate will be handled. However, I predict the opposite trend instead. Your links on Zimbabwe reveal the pernicious threats to existing operations in many third world hell holes. I will cite a few in particular: instability and stupid regimes, and severe lack of fuel, power, and decent labor. And finally, metal prices are too low to overcome it. That is why I see it will be difficult for all but the very lowest cost operations to survive there. As companies continue to reorganize operations and thin down, these Zimbabwe-like mines will continue to be scraped. It would be interesting as a next step of this analysis to put up the following matrixes: 1. gold production by country 2. political risk by country (I've seen a few rating systems) 3. an energy independence rating by country. The final step would be to review costs per mine in those at risk countries, and the analyst could suggest a closure probability range. My gut tells me it is higher than most assume.