Quote Originally Posted by rbeau30 View Post
Just a thought... with PMs so low, wouldn't mining companies be not doing so hot since they cannot sell the PMs to cover the cost of extraction?
There is a lot more that goes into that statement. Hardly any mines in modern large scale mining will mine purely for gold and silver. The larger companies will typically pull the fine particles out through different processes of the main ore extraction. Copper mines will typically have larger gold content within the main ore body, so while the price of gold/silver might be tanking... the main mineral that is being mined will keep the operation above water.

The operations that are hurt the most are typically local, smaller companies that do not have the capital to weather the storm of mineral prices as they go through their ups and downs.

Here is an example (albeit a large one) of how a mining operation functions on copper production with gold/silver being byproducts that are worth processing from the large amounts that can be recovered and the relatively high price (at least for gold right now) they can be sold at on the market. If you have 3 commodities working for you... typically you will be processing one (or 2) for free while only paying for the actual extraction of one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasberg_mine