A Critical Year In Review: What's Next For Metals?
The Gold Report | Dec 12, 2012 06:06AM ET
Every great mining story begins from the ground up. This is as true of critical metals as it is for gold and silver. Many investors took losses by chasing the pie-in-the-sky potential every publicly listed rare earth stock seemed to promise.
Since its debut 18 months ago, The Critical Metals Report has focused on the goods in the ground, striving to present valuable insights on an oft-misrepresented sector, sharing related stories as they emerged. As the year comes to a close and we prepare to extend our coverage further, we are revisiting our most popular expert interviews from 2012. Yes, it's still rough out there for miners, but when you think nothing's looking up, look down.
China's export quotas triggered the investment rush for rare earth elements (REEs). John Kaiser of Kaiser Research Online summarized the first chapter of the REE story in his no-nonsense April 24 interview, "Why Copper Is a Critical Metal ."
Mickey Fulp: Copper's always critical. In my opinion, some so-called experts have bastardized the idea of what critical metals actually input to our industrial society. Copper is absolutely one of the critical metals because it is so tied to the functioning world economy. For example, you can't transmit electricity without copper. Ask the people in New York and New Jersey right now if transmission of electricity is critical. . .
This summer I wrote a "Mercenary Musing" called "Long-Term Fundamentals of the Copper Market"; I'm very bullish on the long-term copper outlook. "Short-Term Fundamentals of the Copper Market" followed about a month later. In it, I was equivocal on the direction of copper in the short term, and by the short term, I'm generally looking one to six months out. So now we're four months into that time frame and I still have the same view of the copper market. It's relatively healthy, but it is not robust.
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