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NEW ORLEANS –This city tolerates public drunks. It’s symptomatic of the thick tourist flow.
At the corner of Toulouse and Bourbon streets in New Orleans, I see that sloppy Big Easy drunks are tolerated. More so, than, say, in law-and-order Houston, even during a Final Four basketball weekend.
This week, I also saw evidence that might validate my belief that Nicaragua is an up-and-coming gold jurisdiction. I have been stating this, having been to Panama, Colombia, Mexico, Honduras and Peru but never Nicaragua, in Ticker Trax.
B2Gold (TSX: T.BTO, Stock Forum) just unveiled rising gold revenues and profits. The greater income comes mostly from La Libertad mine in Nicaragua. An executive at a far smaller Nicaragua gold prospector forwarded me the report.
B2Gold’s gold revenue for the fourth quarter rose to $47 million from 34,039 ounces sold. La Libertad contributed $34 million of the total; The rest came from Limon, another Nicaragua mine.
Not having been to Nicaragua, and modeling my belief on themes I personally have witnessed in Panama and Colombia and Ghana and Mali, I am relieved. I am relieved to see some evidence that gold mines down there can improve output, grades, recoveries, and so on.
I do not own shares of B2Gold, which is active in at least three countries in the central and south Americas. I do own shares of two far smaller Nicaragua prospectors. There aren’t many on the list in that small nation.
Some 80 percent of Nicaragua’s six million residents are younger than age 39. Its GDP of $6.5 billion is growing about three percent a year.
Mining grew 16 percent annually in each of the six years through 2008, almost the same as tourism. That’s according to Nicaragua’s central bank. Exports to the USA are growing with drunken abandon – to $2.7 billion in 2008 from $850 million in 2000. (See the chart – minus dollar and year figures – but you get the idea.)
As in gold-copper equity hotspots such as Colombia, gold is about halfway down the list of Top 10 exports, after coffee, sugar, dairy products: the usual suspects. On the crime scale, Managua and other Nicaragua cities and towns are as safe as metros in Costa Rica and Panama, according to third-party research.
As in Ghana of West Africa, Nicaragua’s mining laws are widely admired as open and fair to both companies and locals. Tax rates for miners are reasonable. If this reads as a puff piece, I apologize. What can I say, hombres?
B2Gold controls two historic mines in Nicaragua, both acquired when a fiscal crisis put local owners to the financial test. La Libertad’s production started in February 2010. That second mine mentioned above, Limon, dates back to the early 1940s.
This theme of fresh owners with fresh cash has been playing at mining theaters in Mexico, in Colombia and Panama … in British Guyana … and even in the USA’s Nevada and Colorado and Canada’s British Columbia and Saskatchewan.
“People go broke all the time, mines shut down; it’s part of a natural rhythm. Same in agriculture, in cattle, in energy,” says John Adams, Colorado-based founder of Sandspring Resources (TSX: V.SSP, Stock Forum) in British Guyana. Mr. Adams’s decade or more of alluvial mining at Guyana’s Toroparu copper and gold project led to the formation and ascent of Sandspring. (I do not own the shares.)
Clive Johnson’s B2Gold now employs 1,600 people in Nicaragua. Those employees produce about three-quarters of the country’s gold, a lot of it shaped and deposited because of prolific geothermal events. Those geothermal ebbs and flows have 2Gold working with others on at least three other exploration projects in Nicaragua.
I thought Ellsworth Dickson of Resource World performed a public service with his recent article on the five or six publicly traded miners in Nicaragua. Very, very concise summary.
Public service is a step or two above public drunkenness, which I imagine benefits Nicaragua beach resorts as much as it does New Orleans’ French Quarter. Public service is someone giving you a gift, as Ellsworth does with the Nicaragua profile.
I believe in Nicaragua, and yes, I have yet to see it with my own eyes. But don’t worry, I will. As I said, I own shares in two prospectors in Nicaragua. When I get down there, when I really fall in love with Nicaragua rock and then lose my shirt in the North America stock market, I’ll own up to that, too. No puff.
True Public Service: I have to include this true act of service. The publisher Streetwise Reports worked with Vista Gold (TSX: T.VGZ, Stock Forum) this week to provide about 100 wheelchairs to folks in and around La Paz, Mexico, on the Baja Sur Peninsula.
The publisher of The Gold Report, Gordon Holmes, was on hand at Vista’s Concordia gold project for the wheelchair handout. Mr. Holmes’ winery, Lookout Ridge in Sonoma County, California, donates a wheelchair for each bottle of wine it sells.
Vista purchased the Concordia property in Mexico in 2002. Gold reserves at Concordia are estimated at 1.3 million ounces. Vista, a Colorado company, says it will need about 18 months of construction after it completes the permitting process.
DISCLOSURES: I plan to attend a Boca Raton, Florida, metals conference in late April. It is the Casey Research Conference. I am told the three-day confab already is sold out. I also am planning to see yet again diamond and gold properties in West Africa in May. That trip will take me, tentatively, to Mali, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia.
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