When Passions Collide

It is surprising and can be funny sometimes when some of our chalk n’ cheese passions collide. Two of my great passions are metal-exploration and tennis. The Serbian Government has cancelled Rio Tinto’s licenses for the Jadar lithium project. The project has a Capex of US$2.4 billion. The development has met with fierce pockets of … Read more

A Yield Swell in the Red-River

Rio Tinto was one of the biggest beneficiaries of China’s rapid recovery from the pandemic. In 2021 huge profits from its iron ore mining generated a $9bn cash-back to shareholders. This pay out included a record final dividend of $6.5bn. It is old physical economy. You can’t get much older than mining as an economic … Read more

Copper Shenanigans

I was a little baffled by the shenanigans last week over the copper price.  Maybe it is something to do with some solar impetus related to the summer solstice. The price of the red metal might seem a trivial concern if it was not so critical, more than ever, to our global economy and civilisation.  The price of … Read more

Organic Gold

Other poets display cabinets of precious rarities, minutely finished…Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in inexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner metals. – Dr Johnson                                         It is July since I last wrote a blog – about silver.  You would think we had all the … Read more

Silver Thursday

Silver Thursday and the Hunt Brothers come to mind given the sudden spurt in the silver price. Over the last couple of weeks the metal has been playing catch up with its richer gilded cousin. Is the silver market still small enough for a rich megalomaniac to manipulate?  It is forty years ago since Silver … Read more

Gold’s Pyrrhic Victory

Life is precarious.  To risk is to live so you have no regrets. For some explorers there is a risk of falling from a lofty perch into the depths of the deepest chasm.   Should we castaway plans and projections in these fragile times?.  What we have left are little stories we tell ourselves based on what we … Read more

The Little Silver Brick

I mentioned global debt of $250 trillion in my “Anything but Paper” Blog on May 15th.  Since then I came across this graphic below from Visual Capitalist https://www.visualcapitalist.com/.  Exploration Geologists love images and drawings that make numbers concrete.  We try to visualize the third dimension and what lies beneath from a map of only two dimensions.  Anyway, I thought that it … Read more

I am Gold and the Silver Tassie

Last Friday  I mentioned gold and silver as interesting precious metals and referenced the historic price ratio between the two metals. I did mention that based on historical ratios that silver was undervalued significantly compared to gold.  The same day the silver price climbed five percent in just one day from $14.67 to finish at $15.41.  As … Read more

Any “Thing” but Paper

In mid-April the EU agreed a 500 billion euro stimulus package at zero percent interest rate to get Europe back on its feet after the Covid-19 pandemic. Two days ago Democrats unveiled a three billion dollar Covid relief stimulus package to be voted on next week. It looks looms large and but really beyond our … Read more

Metallic weapons against Covid-19

Three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse have reached our shores.  Pestilence is in the vanguard, cutting a swath through our cities and villages and byways. In his wake rides War and Death.  Malaria kills nearly a half a million people every year. Over 90 percent of these deaths are in Africa and two out of every … Read more