In a lot of ways silver has been in recent decades the forgotten metal, struggling with an identity crisis as a poor man’s precious metal and/or a rather expensive industrial metal. In its glory days, Broken Hill in western New South Wales was known as Silver City, and to this day the highway leading into the town is so named. Broken Hill gave its name to a rather famous Proprietary, but these day’s when one thinks of BHP Billiton one doesn’t immediately think of silver, or for that matter the zinc and lead upon which the company built its foundations. Today junior mining companies are left to squabble over what commercial deposits may still remain at Broken Hill. Indeed for many years silver became merely a helpful by-product of mining for base metals occurring, as it often does, in base metal deposits. Base metal miners could sell the silver just ...

We have heard alot of discussion lately in regards to why the miners could possibly be doing so horribly, when history has shown us that mining stocks should be skyrocketing given the last 8 year bull run in precious metals.

Two words: Naked Shorting

Jim Sinclair has created a movement lately asking to enlist over 200,000 investors, and thousands of mining companies, to put a stop to the criminal activity of Naked Shorting that literally steals money from investors.  You can see more information on Jim Sinclairs initiative here.

One of the best detailed audio explanations of how Naked Shorting works, listen to this audio program.

Hopefully when this all starts coming to light, the brokers who have engaged in this criminal activity will be spending a long time in a cold cell with a large room-mate named Bubba who finds ex-stock brokers attractive.

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Source: Mineweb.com  06/17/2008
In its review of global trends of the mining industry, Price WaterhouseCoopers predicts that “2008 will reflect production growth that reflects growing cost pressures.”

“Commodity prices will remain volatile; however, recent significant price rises for bulk commodities will positively impact the bottom line,” according to PwC’s fifth annual review of the global mining industry.

“Consistent with the prior year, the industry leaders will continue to spread out from their geographical homes to operate assets globally,” the PwC global mining team forecast in their report, Mine-As good as it gets?

Price WaterhouseCoopers’ global mining team said diversified global miners fared better last year than gold companies who have experienced the weakest margins.

Emerging market companies have shown especially high growth with these companies now comprising 36% of the Top 40 miners’ market capitalization.

The total market cap of the global mining industry achieved 54% growth as measured by the HSBC …

The Gold Report checks in again with Hans Peter Schmidlin, CEO of Precious Capital Ltd. in Zurich. We last interviewed Schmidlin in February (see that interview here) and wanted to get his latest thoughts on gold and the economy. The firm’s Precious Capital Global Mining & Metals Fund invests mainly in the leading global mining companies as well as some junior companies in the mining sector. Schmidlin, who has over 20 years experience in technical analysis, is the former Head of Trading ABN Amro Bank, Zurich, and Founder and editor TnP Research, Baar

TGR: A lot of the buzz here is about the price of gold, currently about $927. All of our sponsors, particularly the gold mining stocks, are waiting for an increase to start funding the mines.

HPS: There are two important points about the price correction in gold. The first one is the anti-correlation …