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How the Liquidity Crises Affect the Junior Explorers

By Neville Maycock
17 Mar 2008 at 12:22 PM GMT-04:00


ORLANDO (ResourceInvestor.com) -- The U.S. Federal Reserve right now is scrambling to deal with many issues within the markets. They are currently dealing with a housing crisis, a liquidity crisis and a mounting national debt.

The markets have seen multiple rate cuts by the Federal Reserve, liquidity injections by other major banks, and an economic stimulus package by the U.S. government. All of these were done in order to stimulate the faltering U.S. economy. World central banks have also helped out by pumping trillions of dollars into the market as well. The end result has been the markets going into a deeper panic, as no one truly knows how far these credit crises have gone.




The Federal Reserve’s hope is to stop a recession from occurring. Thru all of their manipulation of free market forces, they have not been able to stop the current downturn in the markets. Meanwhile the U.S. National Debt keeps rising at an alarming rate and the value of the dollar has reached all-time lows.

An Associated Press report on Friday discussed how Ben Bernanke vowed to help distressed homeowners. Bernanke said the Federal Reserved is "strongly committed to fully employing our authority, expertise and resources to help alleviate their distress." My question to Mr. Bernanke is how do you plan on saving these homeowners, while keeping the dollar afloat while bailing out these homeowners and their associated mortgage banks as well?

Next Bear Stearns, the fifth largest investment bank of the world essentially being bought out for US$236.2 million by JP Morgan because their leverage in a deteriorating sub-prime mortgage market. How can anyone feel comfortable with the state of the markets?

Now some will say in this kind of market environment, the best move will be to put your money into safe havens such as precious metals and their associated stocks. My opinion is while long-term gold and silver will greatly benefit from the devaluing of currency, the associated stocks will not benefit at this point. The reason behind this is that stock investors will be running to the exits trying to take whatever money they have in the markets out of it.

This will include some of the outperforming precious metal stocks. A serious downturn in the world markets all at once will take all the great stocks perform just as poorly as the bad stocks.

Another interesting twist to the liquidity crisis is the junior mining explorers will have a more difficult time obtaining financing for their projects. Banks as well has institutional investors will be very selective in their lending practices and will most likely structure deals that will almost guarantee that they will not lose money on their investment. In this environment marginal projects will not get financed.

Therefore, these junior mining explorers may have to turn to the senior producers, who have plenty of reserve cash, to be their finance partner for their development projects. Again these deals will be greatly skewed to benefit the senior producers.

Thus, junior mining explorers, who have big capital expenditure projects in the bankable feasibility stage, might be delayed a long time in obtaining financing. This will drive supply of the associated metal down. Now will the demand be there by the time these companies obtain financing? These junior companies and their shareholders certainly hope so.

Even though the sub-prime market issues might make all the precious metals bulls finally seem correct in their predictions, the associated mining sector might take a hit as the financing won’t be there to develop these major projects.

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