JER01, you make an excellent point, as well as bring another perspective of valuation. However, I think you might be leaving out some other factors, or maybe you're assuming an "everything else being equal" scenario.
For instance, what about the rate of recovery? Just like $1 received 5 years out is worth less than $1 received next year, I'd imagine that two mining firms with the exact same reserves numbers but recovering them at two different rates would be valued differently. A quicker recovery should equate to a higher present value of assets, correct?
Also, what about debt factors? If one firm is highly leveraged and the other is not, shareholder's equity is much different between the two, no? Even debt payment terms factor in, like if one firm has lower payments from negotiating a longer amortization, then their free cash flow allows them to be more flexible... there's value in that.
Also, what about cost of recovery? If firm A has X ounces-gold at a depth of 5'-25' located along a major highway, and firm B also has X ounce-gold but at a depth of 500'-1,000' depth and located far away from civilized infrastructure, whose cost to recover the same asset base is higher, you know?
For that matter, what about if firm A with X assets is located in Saskatchewan, Canada where the royalties and taxes are different than for firm B with the same X assets in Comstock, Nevada. Those assets will be valued much differently since the cost of recovery, regardless of the mining company's efficiencies and methods, is different.
Calculating a ratio (like price/book, price/sales, price/earnings, etc) can help to form a complete opinion on where a stock could be valued given changes in variables, but only using one ratio erroneously assumes "everything being equal", which it never is. I'd be surprised to see very many close similarities between GSPG and AUY (although admittedly I haven't looked) that would allow us to use only one or two factors of comparison other than they are going after the same commodity, in the same industry, with similar equipment.
"Let's look at your consensus price numbers: .05 to .15."
Now wait, when I said "consensus", it meant that I have noticed that most posts on this board have been saying that GSPG's assets (whether a discount is applied or not, based on individual posters' preference) should be valued in that range, and my argument was that if any number in between this range were correct, GSPG would have less of a discount applied to those assets in a productive mining scenario (although they'd then slow growth considerably as you mentioned, if not semi-permanently... making many on this board very unhappy).
I don't think they are necessarily "reluctant to restart production", rather I assume that a competant management team would weigh the options, potential risks, and rewards to make that decision. In other words, they took the internal rate of return (or investment yield, or whatever you want to say) of all possible projects and took the one which made the most sense from a risk-adjusted basis. Hopefully that's what they did, at least.
AI
