A big attendance at this year's New York Hard Assets event has the chance to listen to a number of eminent specialist commentators, with gold and silver dominating.

Lawrence Williams
May 10, 2011
www.mineweb.com

NEW YORK
Speaking to a packed audience (standing room only) at The New York Hard Assets Conference yesterday, Eric Sprott reiterated his well-known views on gold and silver the former he called the investment of the decade and the latter the investment of the next decade. Sprott was among the Keynote speakers at this year's event which attracted potential investors looking to learn more about investment in commodities and mining companies (mostly junior miners), with the featured speakers being big attractions for the audience.

Like most of the other keynotes, the Sprott's comments covered what virtually all the precious metals bulls see as the key drivers of the markets, namely the U.S deficit, excess printing of money by most major economies, the political unrest in the Middle East, North Africa and elsewhere, the depreciation of the dollar, accelerating global inflation, fear of debt defaults, the growth of wealth and investment in gold and silver in Asia etc. Indeed fellow keynote speaker Jeff Nichols came up with 11 such factors driving up prices. All the main speakers viewed the recent heavy downturns in commodities prices as being a blip in an ongoing upwards path.

While most of the speakers point to the money supply situation in the West as being the root cause of likely future inflation in both Western and Eastern economies, Martin Murenbeeld, one of today's keynote speakers, told Mineweb that China too has been stimulating - perhaps overstimulating - its economy in a similar way and blaming current Chinese inflation on the U.S. Fed is rubbish.

Coming back to Eric Sprott - he raised the specter of market manipulation so beloved of many of the precious metals bulls, pointing to silver falling $6 in 13 minutes on Monday in an extremely thin market when some key market players like China and the UK had public holidays. Coupled with the raising of margin requirements on COMEX, he saw this as a major effort by some of those with huge silver short positions to mitigate some of their losses. "If this doesn't show market manipulation I don't know what does" said Sprott.

Jay Taylor, speaking earlier in the day also raised the specter of the U.S. economy and its lack of growth, even though some official statistics may suggest it is beginning improve. "Think about what's really going on" he opined, "Not what the establishment wants you to think is going on!" Taylor puts total debt at $57 trillion if you take into account not only Federal debt, but state and municipal debt, credit cards etc. He reckons U.S. government policy is failing as in the 1930s when there were years of depression, high unemployment etc. He too pointed to the real price of gold rising in what has been the bull market of a lifetime.

Overall the Hard Assets conference organizers have done a pretty good job in pulling in a number of very well-known names in the precious metals and economic sectors to boost the audiences in the hope that many will stay in the auditorium area and listen to the junior miners and explorers presenting their projects - a number of whom have some very interesting stories to tell anyway. The difficulty for the investor, as always, is picking the wheat from the chaff. In a precious metals bull market junior companies can provide huge returns when they are successful - but then most aren't! Caveat emptor.
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