"But what is certain is that 160 years after a flake of gold found not far from [Colfax, CA] incited a frenzied stampede to the Sierra Nevada foothills, a new gold rush in on. ... 'Anywhere gold have been found in the past,' said Corey Randoph, the field operations director for the Gold Prospectors Association of America. 'That's where they're going again.' ... Mining shops say they cannot keep equipment on the shelves. 'We had a lady in here on crutches, not a young lady either, saying, "I want to buy this $3,200 metal detector and a $1,000 power sluice",' said Steve Herschbach, an owner of Alaska Mining and Diving, a supply shop in Anchorage. 'We tried to talk her down a bit, but she was dead set.' ... Perhaps nowhere is the rush more spirited than in California, home of the Sierra's famed Mother Lode, where the discovery of gold in 1848 caused a national migration. Like their forebears, many of today's prospectors have little more than a pan, a shovel and a dream. ... 'There's nothing like finding gold,' said Pat Putnam, 57, who found a nickel-sized chunk of ore a few years back. 'It's just an unbelievable feeling. Because you know you're the first person to ever lay eyes on that.' ... Jerry Keene, 73, the chief executive of Keene engineering, a leading manufacturer of mining equipment, said, 'Anything connected with gold, we're just about out of'," http://www.nytimes.com/, 5 April 2008.
See my 1 March 2008 post. Incentives count. Americans are withdrawing real resources from other pursuits to go into gold mining. When will our current gold fever end? One sign: when Harvard MBAs prefer companies like: Hecla, Barrick, Newmont, Freeport McMoran C&G, Coeur, Kinross, Goldcorp, etc., as employers to: Goldman Sachs! We'll see if the Harvard MBA Indicator, my 25 Ocotober 2007 and 20 January 2008 posts, holds true for gold mining too. Bear in mind, it takes real resources to produce gold, unlike "Bernankes". I wonder if any of these firms even recruit Harvard MBAs?
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