LONDON – This is “Legally Blonde.”
That’s the title of the award-winning musical here at The Savoy Theatre. It’s right outside the lobby door. Blonde is also is the theme that American activist GATA and its gold aficionados are exploring in the hotel next door, The Savoy on London’s Strand.
This year, coincident with the highest nominal gold price ever, theGold Antitrust Action Committee’s Gold Rush gathering is sold out. Not even standing room.
Everyone who has made metals money in the 12 years I have followed GATA is here. GATA’s Bill Murphy, Chris Powell and Ed Steer are here. Ed just raved to me about the faux-Abba show “Mamma Mia.” (Photo here of John Embry of Sprott Asset Management, along with Bill Murphy’s legally blonde friend, and Mr. Murphy in Savoy lobby – Thom Calandra photo)
“Come on, for once in, how long we been doing this, for once we are legal,” says Mr. Murphy, a Texas resident who speaks in spurts and has steered his non-profit group into USA information-seeking lawsuits and in and out of archives, libraries, databases and central bank transcripts that if laid sheet to sheet would run twice the length of the English Channel.
Great Panther Silver’s (TSX: T.GPR, Stock Forum) and (AMEX:GPL, Stock Forum) Robert Archer is here, explaining the Guanajuato, Mexico, silver dynamic to five serious British investors at the Savoy’s American Bar. (The talk under the table is that Mexico silver producers are poised to consolidate.)
Sprott Asset Management’s John Embryand Eric Sprott are here.
Wits Gold’s (TSX: T.WGR, Stock Forum) Adam Fleming, a U.K. standard-bearer for gold, is here. He is telling me about the next gold rush, this one a rapid consolidation of major and minor miners and prospectors in South Africa’s Witwatersrand Basin. (See photo of Adam Fleming with Thom)
Junior prospector Jeff Dahl, long a GATA backer, is here with his Samex Mining. Golden Valley Mines Ltd. (TSX: V.GZZ, Stock Forum), the Val D’Or, Quebec operator that just completed a three-part spinoff of companies in Canada, is here. (I own shares of GZZ.) Kirkland Lake Gold Inc. (TSX: T.KGI, Stock Forum) is here. First Majestic Silver Corp. (TSX: T.FR, Stock Forum) is here.
James Turk,an economist and the fellow who started payment enabler Goldmoney.com when gold was less than a third of where it is today, is here.Goldmoney now has 19,000 customers and about $2 billion of gold and silver in three repositories: London, Zurich and Hong Kong.
A crop of 30 or so sponsor companies, three-quarters of ‘em from Canada, like Golden Predator Corp. (TSX: T.GPD, Stock Forum), are here. About 400 well-heeled investors and money managers and brokers are here. About 50 gold and silver executives are here.
Hard to fathom such a well-heeled crowd for a group, GATA, that is so ignored, most in the media cannot even label Mr. Murphy’s café of hardened asset investors. (It’s Le Metropole Café.)
Still, one must point out that the broadcast media today (Thursday) did a good to very good job of letting Bill Murphy portray the GATA mission in what he called “London, the belly of the beast” – otherwise known as the gold heathen Bank of England, the International Monetary Fund and the bureaucracy of the London Bullion Markets Association. See media coverage: CNBC.
The few writers and broadcasters who can apply a moniker usually say GATA isa cock-eyed conspiracy theorist, a lunatic collection of self-interested gold traders or a wet dream. Only thing, the wet dream, legally blonde, is here. “The cabal, these bankers, these (unmentionables), are finally losing the fight; the gold price is getting away from them,” he tells me just ahead of a press conference at the conference hotel.
Timing is most everything. “Bill (Murphy) and I started our respective concerns each around the same time,” says James Turk, whose GoldMoney.com celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. “He and Chris (Powell) understand that gold is in the process of redistributing purchasing power. I like to say gold is going back to its rightful owners.”
For those who are looking for investment ideas here, I will be sending them along in due course. At the heart of them: Mr. Turk’s ruminations on what he calls 8000 Dow-$8000 gold. That’s a 1-to-1 nominal partnership. In addition, James Turk’s take on why and when gold equities will resume their celebration of a sustained and higher gold price. (The miners’ output value is far exceeding what the input costs are, he says. That and “pilot error” are contributing to the brunette slash, albeit temporary, in natural resource equities’ legally blonde hairdos.)
In the meantime, as Mr. Murphy, Eric Sprott and Hugo Salinas Price, among many others, prepare for the opening press conference today (Thursday) in a chamber room of the Savoy, Mr. Turk reminded me again of the age-old reasoning on the purchasing power of bullion.
“They used to say you could always buy a set British lunch for four at The Savoy for a sovereign,” said Mr. Turk, an economist in the so-called Austrian school He splits his time among Spain, London and New Hampshire. A sovereign, by the way, is a quarter of an ounce of gold. “Here we are decades later and that ($400 or so) still holds.” (Photo: James Turk, age 64, at The Savoy – Thom Calandra photo)
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