Ross Beaty, the founder of Pan America Silver and Equinox Resources, is not cowed by the bad economic news. He looks at the markets and still sees opportunity.
“I’m not afraid of what’s happening in Europe. Europe is almost irrelevant for what is happening in my business, which is metals,” said the mining legend, who was speaking at the World Resource Investment Conference on Monday.
Beaty, who believes the believes the commodity supercycle is still intact, said there are worries about China, but the trajectory in the country is still good. He notes that China’s government has a big war chest of US$2 to US$3 trillion in savings to weather any downturns in its troubled property sector.
“It has a lot of room to do the type of quantitative easing you saw in 2009 and the US government did very successfully.”
Beaty, however, lamented his company Lumina Copper (TSX-V: LCC) that is selling at a steep discount due to a unfavourable political climate in Argentina. Beatty owns about 25% of the company, which is down 25% for the year and trading at $9.19.
Beaty says there is interest from majors for Lumina’s Taca Taca project, which has an indicated sulphide resource of 10.7 billion lbs copper, 3.11 million ozs gold and 319.8 million lbs molybdenum, but the government has dampened its appeal.
“Right in the middle of that Argentina decided to go protectionist and try to have currency controls and then they went and nationalized YPF, the big oil company. You know, you just can’t get a worse political investment climate that you have in Argentina today. It is such a tragedy since it is such a great country in so many other ways.”
2 Comments
Bariserve
How can Spain and the rest of the world let Argentina’s rulers get away with stealing properties from their rightfully owner and the shareholders. Nothing but thievery.
Lyo
Europe is dependant on China as China is dependant on Europe … I think the European debt crisis is having some effect on the base metals market.