Day: March 3, 2015

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Private-equity interest in mining companies has waned, leaving a handful of players to pick through the debris.

For two years, private equity was all the rage as the mining industry got hit hard by the plummeting commodity prices. Traditional private-equity firms were looking for distressed assets. Bankers and others tried to establish private-equity shops.

But today, many of the big funds have not made mining investments and others have simply given up.

“They thought they could be passive financial investors, raise some capital, put it in some companies. But it is very difficult to find something where you can actually make money,” said Isser Elishis, chief investment officer with Waterton Global Resource Management.

Globally, private-equity mining deals have slipped. Last year, the private pools of capital were involved in 66 deals worth $5-billion, compared with 83 transactions worth $6.7-billion in 2010, according to data compiled by Thomson Reuters.

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http://www.mineweb.com/

The oddities that come in ranking the world’s best places to explore. Strange things happen when you ask exploration company management a hypothetical question about the juiciest regions for discovery.

Every year the Fraser Institute sends out a questionnaire to mining types. Most of them are exploration management (as self-reported.) This year it sent out a little over 4,000 questionnaires and it got back responses from just over 10% of that score.

One of the topics the Fraser Institute addresses, among many, is a question of fantasy. To paraphrase: Based on what you’re familiar with, what areas hold awesome potential for discovery assuming there are no impediments to exploration, like nasty dictators, pushy anti-miners and prohibitive regulation.

The idea, the Fraser Institute says, is to poll what its respondents think are the best regions in terms of raw exploration potential.

It gets weird in two ways. It seems the potential of the world’s rocks, to the survey’s respondents, changes very rapidly, as year to year the best of rankings bounce erratically. And each year the ranking makes for odd juxtaposition.

Let’s take this year’s survey. It doesn’t start out too controversially. Yukon tops it. Alaska comes next. Nevada thereafter.

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The Toronto Star has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

Crowdfunding one solution, prospectors’ conference told

Junior miners must seek new ways to find investors — including crowdfunding — if they want to survive the current industry slump, analysts told a prospectors’ convention.

A turnaround in metals prices isn’t expected until about 2017, but “that’s an eternity for the juniors,” warned longtime analyst and industry observer John Kaiser on Monday at the Prospectors and Developers Association conference in Toronto.

“We are now in the worst bear market in decades,” noted Kaiser, who is based in San Francisco and has covered the topsy-turvy sector since 1983.

He said the ongoing bear market has been dismissed as a cyclical downturn that will eventually reverse, as it always has. For instance the five-year downturn in the mining industry after the Bre-X gold salting scandal in 1997 was followed by a ‘super cycle’ of 13 years of sky-high metals prices and record share prices.

“While true for majors (big mining companies) whose fortunes hinge on the commodity cycle, it may not be true for juniors,” he said.

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