Opinions

For an economist, these are interesting times. The accumulating American triple deficit – on trade, the government budget and household spending – finally caught up with the people who live by lending.

For an economist, these are interesting times. The accumulating American triple deficit – on trade, the government budget and household spending – finally caught up with the people who live by lending.

There is a belief in sports that players play their best after the darkest hours and rise to the occasion with some of their better efforts.

“We are reaching a point where the mining supply industry in Sudbury and Northern Ontario is as important for the global mining industry as the orebodies.

Mining supply and service companies don’t normally own gold mines, but there are gold mines out there for companies that are looking.

Euphoria pretty well summarizes the state of the mining industry in 2008 and the mood in the Ontario mining cluster of Sudbury, Timmins and North Bay.

Here is the formula for a crystal ball. Take a cube of derived demand, add a book from a Singapore scholar, stir in some used predictions and a sprinkling of judgment.

If David Robinson’s crystal ball, below, is accurate in predicting several more decades of voracious demand for metals, it won’t just be mining suppliers who stand to benefit.

Mining is a rough industry and nowhere is it as challenging as Northern Ontario’s deep, hardrock operations. The mines are hot, dirty and wet. The air has to be pumped in, as if miners were working on another planet.

If nickel, copper, gold and all of the other metals we work so hard to find, extract and process were just lying in heaps somewhere on the surface of the earth, we’d all be fat, lazy and probably a bit slow.