RE:Northern Miner: Barrick Gold Corporation shelves Pascua-LamaNot exactly "shelving" as the headline states. More like yet another in a exasperating series of seemingly endless stop-starts. Barrick doesn't seem to know what to do wtih Pascua-Lama. It's dug itself in far too deep to walk away, but seems increasingly burdened by the cash and regulatory sinkhole it presents. At some point one would hope that the metals prices recover sufficiently to make its enormous capital cost justifiable - and hope that politicians down there would come to their senses! - but that could be a ways off yet.
SLW is covered by the alternate take-offs until the end of 2016, but the way Pascua-Lama keeps getting pushed back further and further makes one think that maybe revoking the stream while Barrick still has cash to buy it back might not be a good thing in the long run. Cash in the bank is valued a lot more right now than (gold and) silver in the ground. At least it would put all this uncertainty out of the picture, and the capital recovered could perhaps be better deployed. IMO, that would be in a series of much smaller, more developed, and (especially) less politically risky projects.