Gold-oil ratio goes wild

Gold miners can now buy 30.33 barrels of West Texas Intermediate crude oil for every ounce of gold they sell. That is the most in at least 15 years.

If history is any guide, I’d expect that extreme reading to revert to the mean, which would require cheaper gold or pricier oil. But for now, gold miners are doing great. Which is probably why their stock index looks like this:

Want to understand Colombia’s gold mining situation?

You need to read the newish Atavist book, The Devil Underground, by Nadja Drost.   Here, Drost has written the best explanation I’ve ever seen of the battle for Antioquia between the Urabeños and the Rastrojos. And has shown herself to be a brave, serious reporter who will stop at nothing to really understand a story. And has given readers an idea of what they buy when they buy gold, particularly Colombian gold. She has also written one of the most beautiful pieces of literary nonfiction I’ve read in a long time. I’ve been reading and writing a lot about Gran Colombia Gold, which is trying to turn Segovia into a normal professional mine. I have been reading about this situation for years, but now I feel like I am about 10 times closer to understanding it — even though this book barely mentions Gran Colombia. It’s well worth your US$3.99. Go read it.

UPDATE: I hadn’t seen this, which shows that a connection between crime and gold may remain present in Colombia.

About that $12 billion gold miner in Venezuela

Las Cristinas, Venezuela’s most promising gold resource, 2009. Courtesy of BM.

I can’t stop thinking about the fact that Venezuela’s central bank bought 40% of the country’s state gold miner from the state oil company and paid $12 billion. That values the company as a whole at $30 billion.

We know from Rusoro and a series of other gold companies, some of whose names can not be spoken aloud, that mining for gold in Venezuela is barely, if at all, profitable. The output must be sold at the official exchange rate. That means that gold prices in Venezuela are the cheapest in the world. It gives some employment to an otherwise depressed part of the country, sure. And the central bank probably does build up a few ounces a year of gold holdings from these mines. But $12 billion. That is a lot of money. By comparison, Rusoro, which had real mines and real employees, and actually tried to mine the resources profitably, even months before it lost its mines to the government, had a market capitalization of less than $100 million.

Why? Why would the BCV make such a fiction as to pay $12 billion dollars for a near-worthless asset? Why do an 11-digit transaction? All I can wonder is whether someone got the usual M&A commissions. I don’t know, but if the commissions were set up proportionately to the year’s other deal of the same order of magnitude, commissions may have been in the tens of millions of dollars: advisor fees for the Glencore-Xstrata deal were reportedly $140 million, on a transaction valued as high as $90 million. If someone did get a commission here, I suppose they earned it.

UPDATE June 27: BCV got a bargain. PDVSA previously said the gold company was worth $40 billion. This valuation appears to be a simple multiplication of proved ounces x gold price, as though there were no costs involved in extracting gold, no risk of gold price changes, and no political risk. That makes sense.

UPDATE2: Gustavo Coronel blows a fuse.

UPDATE3 June 29: As Gustavo rightly points out, the only known asset of this particular state gold miner is the Las Cristinas-Brisas gold and copper deposit, which has had quite a history. Earlier, I referred to Venezuelan gold output, but that is all at Minerven.