In mining, we’re trained to notice subtle structural shifts long before the surface breaks open. A faint offset in bedding. A change in alteration intensity. A stress field rotating just enough to matter.
Corporate structures behave the same way.
Earlier this month, Newmont Corporation issued a formal notice of default to Barrick Gold Corporation under the Nevada joint venture agreement governing Nevada Gold Mines (NGM). The filing cited alleged mismanagement and diversion of resources, and confirmed that inspection and audit rights had been exercised.
On its face, this is a governance dispute. Production at NGM remains strong. Costs are stable. Nevada’s geology hasn’t changed.
But structurally? Something has shifted.
A Dispute That Didn’t Happen Overnight
Default notices in billion-dollar joint ventures do not appear spontaneously.
They follow:
Internal reviews
Board-level dialogue
Legal consultation
Documentation gathering
Strategic escalation
By the time a notice is filed, the stress has already been building.
Since late 2025, the major Nevada operators have been signaling broader portfolio thinking — including discussions around unlocking value through structural clarity in North American assets. Overlay that with a rising gold price environment and renewed supercycle conversations, and you have a combustible mix of incentive realignment and valuation pressure.
In downturns, synergy marriages are easy. In upcycles, ambition reawakens.
The Geometry of the Nevada JV
NGM is structured with:
Barrick holding a 61.5% economic interest and serving as operator
Newmont holding 38.5%
That structure worked exceptionally well when the joint venture was formed in 2019. The thesis was clear: operational integration across the Carlin, Cortez, and Turquoise Ridge complexes would drive cost efficiencies, optimize infrastructure, and extend district life.
And it largely did.
But majority operator and minority economic heavyweight structures always carry inherent tension. Incentives must remain aligned — not just operationally, but strategically.
When wholly owned growth assets exist outside the JV framework, capital allocation decisions become more sensitive. In a rising gold price environment, every ounce of development sequencing carries valuation implications.
This isn’t about personalities. It’s about geometry.
What a Default Notice Really Signals
It’s important to be precise here.
A notice of default:
Is a contractual mechanism
Does not automatically imply collapse
Often triggers formal remediation processes
Can lead to quiet resolution
It signals material disagreement — not necessarily structural failure.
Mining investors sometimes confuse operational performance with governance stability. They are related, but not identical. You can have excellent quarterly production numbers and still have deep philosophical differences about long-term capital allocation.
Governance stress testing often happens precisely when assets are most valuable.
The Supercycle Overlay
If gold is indeed entering a prolonged higher-price regime, governance clarity becomes more important — not less.
Upcycles amplify everything:
Capital competition between projects
Investor scrutiny
Executive ambition
Asset monetization strategies
Structural repositioning
Markets reward:
Transparent incentive alignment
Clean ownership narratives
Clear capital allocation discipline
They discount ambiguity.
If the major Nevada operators are repositioning for valuation optimization, strategic separation, or portfolio refinement, friction inside a joint venture of this scale becomes almost inevitable.
This may not be dysfunction. It may be transition.
What It Means for Nevada
For Nevada, the implications are layered.
Potential Upside:
Governance reset and clearer alignment
Renewed exploration intensity
Capital discipline sharpened
Structural clarity for long-term development
Potential Risk:
Short-term volatility
Delayed project sequencing
Workforce uncertainty
Investor hesitation during dispute resolution
Nevada’s rocks remain world-class. That doesn’t change.
What evolves is the structure around them.
Communities like Elko have lived alongside this joint venture since its formation. Integration reshaped contractor ecosystems, exploration pipelines, and employment patterns. Any structural shift — even if ultimately positive — will ripple outward.
Change in large mining systems is rarely quiet.
Governance as Decision Infrastructure
If there is a deeper lesson in this moment, it is this:
Mining success is not only geological. It is structural. It is financial. It is governance-driven.
Ore bodies don’t fail because of grade alone. They fail because of misaligned incentives, capital misallocation, or structural inefficiencies. Conversely, marginal deposits succeed when governance and strategy align.
The Nevada Gold Mines JV was a masterclass in integration during a downcycle. The question now is whether the next phase of the gold cycle demands a different structural configuration.
Are we witnessing a temporary shear zone that will anneal under pressure?
Or the early stages of a new structural regime in Nevada gold?
Either way, cycles reward clarity. And Nevada’s future will be shaped not just by what lies beneath the surface — but by how its stewards choose to structure, govern, and allocate the capital above it.
There are moments in commodity markets when price ceases to be a conclusion and begins to function as a signal. Not the fleeting kind that flashes during a speculative frenzy or vanishes with the next headline, but something quieter and more consequential. A recognition embedded in the numbers themselves that the underlying rules have shifted.
This is not a story of a single spike or a short-lived squeeze. It is not the familiar choreography of hot money chasing momentum before slipping back out the side door. What we are seeing instead is a deeper reorientation, where pricing begins to reflect a change in how the world expects to operate—how it intends to power itself, secure itself, and hedge its own uncertainties.
As we look ahead to 2026, that reorientation is becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss. Gold, silver, copper, and uranium are not moving in perfect harmony, nor are they responding to the same immediate pressures. Each is rising for its own reasons, shaped by distinct demand drivers and structural constraints. Yet taken together, their trajectories form a recognizable pattern. Less a traditional boom-and-bust cycle, and more a system of parallel flows—multiple lanes advancing at different speeds, carrying different forms of value, all bound for the same horizon.
This is the multi-lane super cycle. And the prices flashing across the screen are not the destination. They are the dashboard lights, telling us that something fundamental is already in motion beneath the hood.
Gold: When Insurance Becomes Collateral
Gold’s move toward the $5,000-per-ounce range is not being driven by fear in the traditional sense. This is not a panic trade, nor a reflexive rush for safety. What is unfolding is better understood as a process of re-anchoring—a recalibration of what constitutes stability in an increasingly unstable financial landscape.
Central banks, in particular, are no longer approaching gold as a hedge reserved for moments of crisis. Instead, they are treating it as a structural reserve asset: a form of value that sits outside political alignment, credit risk, and fiscal experimentation. In a world where neutrality is difficult to find and trust is unevenly distributed, gold’s political indifference has become one of its most valuable attributes. Alongside this shift, private capital is rediscovering gold for similar reasons—not as an emotional refuge, but as a rational counterbalance to long-duration fiscal policies whose ultimate outcomes remain uncertain.
As prices push into the $4,800–$5,500 per ounce range, gold begins to behave differently within portfolios. It stops functioning as insurance you hope never to claim and starts acting as collateral you expect to rely on. That distinction matters. Collateral invites institutional participation, and institutions do not move on impulse. They allocate deliberately, often for long periods, embedding assets like gold more deeply into the financial architecture.
Viewed through this lens, gold’s role in 2026 is less about protection and more about positioning. It occupies the quiet lane of the multi-lane super cycle—steady, deliberate, and largely unglamorous, yet foundational to everything moving alongside it.
Silver: The Torque Beneath the Hood
Silver occupies a very different lane from gold, and it makes no effort to be subtle. Where gold moves with measured confidence, silver responds with acceleration. The long-standing notion that silver somehow belongs in the $20–$30 range has already been overtaken by events. Prices brushing $70 per ounce, with credible pathways toward $100, are not an anomaly so much as a long-delayed correction.
This is not simply a story of silver “catching up” to gold. It is silver being repriced for what it actually is: a metal that sits at the intersection of monetary psychology and industrial necessity. Unlike gold, silver is consumed. It is embedded in solar panels, power electronics, data infrastructure, and the physical systems required to electrify modern economies. These are not speculative end uses or distant forecasts; they are embedded in policy frameworks, capital budgets, and energy security strategies already being executed.
In this context, silver’s volatility is often misunderstood. It is not a weakness of the market, but a function of its structure. Thin markets move quickly when attention arrives, and silver has always been exquisitely sensitive to shifts in focus. When gold establishes a new price regime, it tends to pull silver into the conversation, and once that happens the response is rarely linear.
If gold serves as the anchor of the multi-lane super cycle, silver provides the torque. And torque, by its nature, does not move gently—it amplifies force, turning steady pressure into rapid motion.
Copper: Pricing the Physical World
Copper occupies the most load-bearing lane of the super cycle. It is heavier, louder, and far less forgiving than the metals moving alongside it. Where gold and silver trade on trust and attention, copper answers to something more basic: the physical requirements of a modern, electrified world.
At prices and forecasts ranging from $5.00 to $7.00 per pound, copper is no longer being priced on regional growth narratives or short-term manufacturing cycles. It is being priced on physics. Power grids, data centers, electric vehicles, renewable energy systems, and the expanding infrastructure behind artificial intelligence all depend on one unyielding constant—large volumes of conductive metal delivered reliably and at scale. There are no clever substitutes waiting in the wings.
In this environment, the price story cannot be separated from the supply story. Copper’s geology is becoming more difficult just as its demand profile steepens. Declining head grades, aging mine fleets, extended permitting timelines, and growing social and environmental constraints ensure that new supply arrives slowly, if at all. Recycling and scrap recovery provide important support, but they are incremental solutions in the face of structural demand growth, not cures.
By 2026, copper no longer fits comfortably into the category of a speculative commodity. It is a civilization input, being repriced to reflect the true cost—and growing difficulty—of keeping modern systems powered, connected, and running without interruption.
Uranium: When Time Becomes the Scarce Commodity
Uranium moves through the super cycle on a very different clock. It occupies the most unusual lane, governed less by daily sentiment and more by long planning horizons that suddenly compress when reality intrudes. Unlike most commodities, uranium does not trade continuously on mood or momentum. It reprices episodically—sometimes abruptly—when utilities recognize that time, rather than price, has become the binding constraint.
That recognition is no longer theoretical. Long-term contracting cycles are reasserting themselves as reactor life extensions, restarts, and new builds quietly reset demand expectations across the global fleet. At the same time, years of underinvestment in primary supply and fuel-cycle capacity have left the market with limited elasticity. When demand moves forward, supply struggles to follow, and the gap is measured not just in pounds, but in years.
Within a forecasted $90–$140 per pound range, uranium prices are signaling more than the cost of fuel. They are reflecting the value of security of supply, the friction points within conversion and enrichment, and a broader shift in how nuclear energy is perceived. Once politically fraught, nuclear power has become increasingly indispensable—particularly in a world that now depends on reliable, round-the-clock electricity to sustain digital infrastructure, data centers, and emerging technologies.
Uranium’s market remains thin, its signals easy to miss until they suddenly dominate the conversation. But when utilities act, they do so with urgency born of necessity. And urgency, as markets have learned repeatedly, has little patience for yesterday’s price anchors.
Price as Prelude
Taken together, the price trajectories of gold, silver, copper, and uranium do not point to a synchronized peak or a speculative crescendo poised to collapse under its own enthusiasm. They point instead to something far more durable: a broad repricing of materials that sit at the foundation of monetary trust, electrification, and energy security. Each metal is moving for its own reasons, within its own lane, yet all are responding to the same underlying signal—the growing recognition that the systems we depend on are materially constrained.
What matters is not that prices are higher, but that they are staying higher, settling into new ranges that reflect structural realities rather than temporary dislocations. Markets are beginning to internalize the cost of complexity: the time it takes to permit, to build, to finance, and to operate in a world where friction is no longer an exception but a baseline condition. Price, in this context, becomes less a verdict and more a messenger, carrying information about what can no longer be taken for granted.
And that message does not stop at the trading desk.
Once prices move into these new regimes, they begin to alter behavior. Capital reallocates. Risk tolerances shift. Projects once considered marginal suddenly warrant a second look, while others are re-evaluated not on headline grade or scale, but on deliverability. The conversation moves away from “Is there demand?” and toward “Can this actually be built, permitted, financed, and processed in time to matter?”
This is where the repricing radiates outward—into exploration strategies, permitting pathways, processing decisions, and even national policy. Higher prices validate effort, but sustained prices justify commitment. They encourage drilling programs that would have seemed premature a few years ago, accelerate timelines that were once comfortably elastic, and force a reckoning with bottlenecks that markets previously ignored.
In that sense, price is not the story’s climax. It is the opening note. What follows is the reshaping of an industry—and a set of strategic priorities—around the physical realities those prices now reflect.
The Ripple Effects: What Follows Price
When price regimes shift, behavior follows. Not immediately, and not uniformly—but inevitably. Capital is patient until it isn’t. And as we look toward 2026, the second half of this story is already coming into focus, shaped by decisions made quietly over the past year and validated by the successes of 2025.
What is emerging is not a frenzy, but a recalibration.
Exploration activity, particularly drilling, is re-accelerating—not in euphoric waves, but in disciplined, data-driven programs aimed squarely at near-term relevance. This is not the return of “drill everything everywhere.” It is a more selective revival, guided by price signals that have proven durable enough to justify effort, but not so frothy as to reward indiscretion. Grassroots targets are being dusted off where geology and access align. Brownfields are being re-examined with fresh eyes. Districts once dismissed as “too complex” are being revisited as processing technology, infrastructure, and policy alignment begin to converge.
Permitting, long regarded as the immovable choke point of Western mining, is also beginning to show signs of selective thaw. Not a wholesale loosening, but a meaningful shift in tone. The regulatory temperature is changing—not because standards have disappeared, but because priorities have sharpened. High-profile approvals and procedural milestones achieved in 2025 have done something subtle but powerful: they have reintroduced precedent.
FAST-41, in particular, has made permit timelines to matter again—not as a slogan, but as a framework. Projects that align clearly with national supply-chain priorities, energy security, and critical-minerals objectives are finding pathways that were previously opaque. The message from regulators is no longer “nothing moves,” but rather “some things now move faster than others.” That distinction changes behavior across the entire development pipeline.
The most telling ripple, however, is the elevation of processing and metallurgy from afterthought to strategy.
When governments, defense agencies, and industrial planners begin investing directly in mills, refineries, and modular processing solutions, they are acknowledging a hard truth that markets long preferred to ignore: raw materials without processing capacity are liabilities, not assets. Concentrates trapped behind geopolitical bottlenecks or absent domestic refining pathways offer little real security, regardless of how impressive the resource looks on paper.
This recognition is already reshaping priorities across the sector:
Processing is becoming policy, not just engineering
Metallurgy is moving upstream, influencing exploration decisions earlier
Modular and distributed milling concepts are gaining traction where centralized capacity is constrained
Defense and energy security frameworks are now intersecting directly with mine planning
As a result, exploration itself is being reframed. Ore quality, mineralogy, and metallurgical behavior are gaining weight relative to sheer tonnage. Proximity to infrastructure and processing options is no longer a footnote—it is central to valuation. Complexity, once a reason to walk away, is increasingly viewed as a source of optionality in a world willing to invest in solutions.
In this environment, the winners are not simply those with the biggest deposits, but those whose projects can move—through permitting, through processing, and ultimately into supply chains that now care deeply about origin, reliability, and timing.
Price opened the door. 2025 proved that it could stay open. 2026 is shaping up to be the year the industry walks through it.
Beyond the Rocks
The multi-lane super cycle does not end at the edge of a pit or the closing bell of a market. It extends outward, shaping decisions far beyond mines and balance sheets. It is already visible in geopolitics and defense planning, in energy strategy and industrial policy, and even in the cultural conversation about what progress costs and what restraint truly means. These metals are not just inputs; they are signals of intent.
What is unfolding is not a scramble for resources in the old sense. It is a reprioritization—a quiet but consequential recognition that materials underpin systems, and that systems, in turn, underpin societies. Reliability now matters as much as efficiency. Origin matters alongside price. Time, once treated as flexible, has reasserted itself as a constraint. In this environment, price becomes the first language these realities speak, but it is not the last.
By the time 2026 fully arrives, the question will no longer be whether gold, silver, copper, or uranium deserved higher prices. That debate will feel quaint. The more pressing question will be whether sufficient groundwork was laid while prices were still doing the explaining—whether exploration was advanced, permits secured, processing capacity built, and supply chains reinforced before urgency replaced deliberation.
Because once the super cycle moves from the dashboard to the roadway, change accelerates. Capital commits. Policies harden. Timelines compress. The landscape reshapes itself not in theory, but in practice.
And through it all, the rocks remain patient witnesses. They do not argue. They do not persuade. They simply record the choices we make and the signals we choose to heed.
Civilization runs on minerals. Gold may glitter, but copper carries our current, uranium powers our grids, and rare earths anchor the very magnets that spin the world. Without them, the skyscrapers don’t rise, the phones don’t ring, and the servers that feed the cloud go dark. Mining is not just an industry; it is the bedrock upon which every other modern enterprise rests.
And yet, here we stand in 2025, after more than a decade of neglect. The global mining industry has starved its own “R&D department”—exploration. Budgets have been slashed, geologists retired without replacement, and entire districts left unmapped since the 1980s. Instead of planting seeds for the future, the sector has lived off old harvests, leaning on deposits discovered by the last great exploration wave of the 1960s–1990s.
It’s the equivalent of eating the seed corn to make it through winter. Yes, you may survive the lean season, but when spring arrives the fields are bare. The industry now faces a generational dilemma: demand is rising with electrification, AI-driven power consumption, and defense needs, but the pipeline of new discoveries is running dry.
The warning signs are already here. Grades are falling, permitting timelines stretch a decade or more, and the very talent pool of geologists—the human capital that finds ore before machines can mine it—is shrinking. The exploration torch is passing out, just as the world needs it most.
This is the seed corn problem: an industry that mistook austerity for efficiency, cost-cutting for strategy, and in doing so mortgaged its future.
Why Exploration Matters
Exploration is the ghost in the machine—the unseen force that keeps the gears of civilization turning. Mines are not infinite. Ore bodies deplete, grades decline, and production costs inevitably climb. Without a steady stream of new discoveries, the reserves that underpin our supply chains wither away.
When exploration falters, the ripple effects are immediate and profound:
Depletion at the source: Mature mines close or shift to lower-grade zones, requiring more energy, more water, and more waste rock for every ton of metal produced.
Fragile supply chains: Scarcity tightens the noose. Nations grow dependent on single suppliers or unstable jurisdictions, inviting shortages and geopolitical choke points.
Economic exposure: Industries that appear cutting-edge—AI, data centers, quantum computing, crypto, electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels—become castles built on sand, unsupported by the very raw materials that make them possible.
History proves the point. The U.S. uranium boom of the 1950s, the global porphyry copper discoveries of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Carlin Trend gold rush in Nevada all reshaped economies and societies. But each relied on bold, boots-on-the-ground exploration—and each took decades to bring from discovery to production. Without planting new seeds today, there will be no harvest tomorrow.
Exploration is not optional. It is the bedrock of resilience, the insurance policy against scarcity, and the quiet act of faith that there will still be metal in the mill when the world comes calling.
What Happened to the Juniors?
Once, junior explorers were the daring prospectors of capital markets. They were scrappy, nimble, and driven by geologists with calloused hands and big dreams—funded by retail investors and risk-tolerant funds who saw the outsized upside of a drill-bit discovery. They were the seed planters.
Today, they’re skeletal. The ecosystem that once sustained them has been hollowed out by a perfect storm of mistrust, market shifts, and changing appetites for risk.
Burned Trust (2011–2015): Billions vanished in the last gold cycle. Over-promises, bad geology, and outright scams poisoned the well. Investors fled, leaving legitimate juniors to starve alongside the frauds.
ETF Domination: Passive index funds became the new custodians of capital. They allocate by market cap, not by exploration potential. Drill holes don’t move the needle. The capital pool that once flowed freely into high-risk discovery stories has shrunk to a trickle.
Retail Drift: The everyday investor who once bought a thousand shares of a penny-stock explorer on a hunch now chases tech IPOs, cannabis booms, meme stocks, and crypto tokens. Rocks lost their shine in a world of instant returns and digital buzz.
Risk Aversion: Institutional capital demands cash flow, not speculation. Money flows to mid-tiers and majors who can produce quarterly results, not to juniors who burn cash in search of something that may not exist.
The result? An entire generation of junior companies reduced to husks—managing legacy properties, eking out survival on private placements, or vanishing altogether. Where once the TSX-Venture exchange was a bustling bazaar of discovery, it is now a thinly traded echo chamber.
The juniors are left begging for scraps. And without them, the pipeline of new discoveries—the very seed corn of the mining industry—runs dry.
Why the Majors Look Away
Big mining companies are not innocent bystanders in this drought of discovery. They’ve made a calculated choice—a choice that prioritizes quarterly comfort over generational security.
Dividends > Drills: Shareholders demand yield, not uncertainty. The likes of BHP, Rio Tinto, and Vale trumpet their dividend programs as proof of “discipline,” funneling billions back to investors instead of into the geologists who might find tomorrow’s ore bodies. The City of London and Bay Street cheer, but the exploration pipeline withers.
M&A Is Easier: Why risk the cost and uncertainty of greenfield exploration when you can let juniors shoulder the burden and then swoop in later? Barrick, Newmont, and Anglo American have built portfolios on acquisitions rather than discoveries, paying premiums for ounces once desperation sets in. This strategy works only as long as juniors exist—and today, even that seedbed is failing.
Permitting Pain: In the U.S., a new mine can take 10–15 years to permit. In Chile, Peru, and Argentina, political shifts and social unrest regularly derail development. Even Canada, once a paragon of mining stability, has bogged down in federal-provincial wrangling. To the majors, exploration feels like wasted effort if politics can veto production. Why drill if a discovery just becomes a stranded asset?
Artificial Scarcity: A tighter project pipeline props up higher commodity prices. For majors, scarcity is profitable—at least in the short run. Copper prices hold stronger when new supply is uncertain. Uranium equities rally when no new projects are breaking ground. But this “discipline” is short-sighted. Artificial scarcity enriches today’s balance sheets while mortgaging tomorrow’s grids.
The majors’ restraint looks like prudence, but in truth, it is systemic neglect. They have mistaken risk aversion for strategy. Instead of seeding the next generation of mines, they are cannibalizing the last generation’s discoveries, hoping someone else will do the dirty work of prospecting.
Yet “someone else” no longer exists. The juniors are starved, governments are paralyzed, and the majors have parked their drills. The system is eating itself.
The Timeline of Consequences
The story of exploration neglect is not abstract. It unfolds on a clock, with milestones as predictable as they are dire. Here’s what we will see in the coming year, 5 years, and 10 years if this pattern of neglect is allowed to continue:
📍 1 Year (2026): The Plateau(if this isn’t already the case)
Reserves continue to shrink across commodities—global copper reserves, for example, are already skewed toward lower-grade porphyries that cost twice as much to mine as their predecessors.
Senior geologists retire, taking with them decades of local knowledge about belts in Nevada, the Andes, and the African Copperbelt. Their field notebooks, often never digitized, gather dust in basements.
Once-vibrant districts—like northern Ontario’s greenstone belts or the Carlin Trend in Nevada—begin to lose their intellectual “muscle memory.” The living knowledge that connects old drill logs to new targets vanishes.
📍 5 Years (2030): The Gap
Project pipelines hollow out. The majors’ development schedules, already thin, collapse into a handful of advanced brownfield expansions.
Juniors consolidate into survival mergers or collapse outright, leaving only a skeletal handful of companies with active drills. The TSX-Venture—the historical cradle of global discovery—is reduced to a backwater of shell companies and recycled management teams.
Governments scramble to reverse decades of neglect: Washington floats “Critical Mineral Moonshots,” Brussels pushes exploration tax credits, Beijing doubles down on African offtake agreements. But the measures are too late. You cannot conjure ore bodies with subsidies once the drills have gone silent.
Supply deficits bite. Copper, lithium, and rare earths become the new oil shocks—triggering inflation, power rationing, and trade wars over who gets the last shipments.
📍10 Years (2035): The Ghost Tap
You cannot turn on a tap that isn’t connected to a pipeline. Mines take 10–20 years to permit and build. By 2035, the missing decade of exploration has come due.
Critical minerals are no longer market stories—they are national security flashpoints.
China leverages its dominance in rare earths to dictate terms in global trade.
The U.S. Defense Department stockpiles uranium and cobalt like Cold War-era oil.
Europe, unable to build batteries without imported lithium, faces rolling blackouts and stalled EV adoption.
Even record-high commodity prices won’t matter. A $15,000/t copper price or $200/lb uranium price won’t magically materialize new deposits. Discovery takes decades, and the decade has already been lost.
The result is a ghost system: idle smelters, shuttered gigafactories, and stalled wind and solar farms—technology stranded for want of the materials that should have been planted years before.
The Geopolitical Context
We are entering an era where geology is geopolitics. Control of the periodic table is now as decisive as control of sea lanes or satellite constellations.
China throttles rare earth exports, weaponizing its near-monopoly in magnets and battery materials. Its Belt and Road Initiative has already secured lithium and cobalt across Africa and South America.
Russia leans into resource nationalism, tying uranium exports and energy corridors to its foreign policy goals. Kazakhstan—producer of over 40% of the world’s uranium—sits in Moscow’s orbit.
India is no longer just a consumer but an aggressive competitor, racing to lock down lithium supplies in Argentina and rare earth projects in Australia.
The West risks becoming a permanent importer, dependent on rivals for the metals that power its grids, weapons, and economies.
This is not about abstract “market dynamics.” It is about whether democracies will control their own futures.
Without uranium, copper, lithium, and rare earth elements, there is no AI revolution, no data center backbone, no renewable transition, no electric vehicle fleet. Strip away the minerals, and the high-tech towers of modernity collapse like sandcastles in the tide.
And here lies the hard truth: exploration is the first act of sovereignty. Mines take 10–20 years to permit and build. If we do not plant seeds now, by the 2030s the United States and its allies will be paying whatever price Beijing or Moscow demands—or doing without altogether.
The call to action is clear:
Reinvest in exploration with the urgency of a Manhattan Project—geological surveys, public-private partnerships, and incentives that pull risk capital back into the field.
Build Western supply chains that can withstand geopolitical shocks, from Nevada lithium to Saskatchewan uranium to Australian rare earths.
Treat geology as strategy, not afterthought. The United States Geological Survey should be viewed with the same seriousness as the Pentagon, for both are guardians of national defense.
This is the rallying cry for the U.S. and its allies: sovereignty begins at the drill rig. Without exploration, there is no mining. Without mining, there is no economy. Without an economy built on secure foundations, there is no freedom to defend.
A Glimmer of Policy Reform
For all the gloom, there are sparks of recognition—early shoots that hint the field may not be barren forever.
FAST-41 Permitting Reform: Once a bureaucratic chokehold, permitting in the U.S. is showing signs of movement. The Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council (FAST-41) is beginning to streamline timelines for “covered projects.” Uranium juniors like Anfield Energy with its Velvet-Wood mine in Utah, and EnCore Energy with Dewey-Burdock in South Dakota, have already secured wins under this process. What once looked like stranded assets are edging toward daylight.
Pentagon–MP Materials Partnership: The U.S. Department of Defense has invested directly in MP Materials’ Mountain Pass rare earth mine in California—hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to secure separation and magnet manufacturing capacity on U.S. soil. This is no boutique project: MP Materials controls the only rare earth mine (of scale) in the U.S. and is ramping toward vertical integration that could anchor a Western supply chain.
Copper as a Keystone: Projects like Resolution Copper in Arizona—one of the largest undeveloped copper resources in the world—remain politically tangled, but their scale makes them unavoidable. If unlocked, Resolution alone could supply up to 25% of U.S. copper demand for decades.
Lithium Rising: The controversial but progressing Thacker Pass project in Nevada, and Ioneer’s Rhyolite Ridge, have secured federal loans and partnerships, positioning the U.S. as a serious player in lithium carbonate production. Thacker Pass, with more than $2 billion in projected investment, is not just a mine but a downstream refining hub in the making.
Downstream Momentum: Supply chains are finally catching political attention. From rare earth magnet plants in Texas to lithium hydroxide refineries in Nevada, the U.S. is beginning to invest not only in the rocks, but in the capacity to turn them into finished products. That is the true measure of sovereignty.
These reforms are encouraging, but they are still small strokes on a canvas that demands bold, sweeping lines. A handful of permitting wins and defense contracts are not a revolution. What’s needed is a scale-up—tenfold, a hundredfold. Only when the U.S. and its allies treat minerals with the same urgency once reserved for oil, or for the space race, can we say things have truly changed.
This glimmer is fragile, but it is real. If fanned, it could light the torch of a new exploration renaissance.
Conclusion: Choose Risk or Embrace Ruin
The mining industry thought it was playing it safe by pulling back on exploration. In truth, it was gambling the future—trading short-term stability for long-term scarcity. The result is hollow pipelines, fragile supply chains, and a generation of geological knowledge at risk of fading into silence.
Exploration is not a luxury. It is the R&D of civilization itself. Without it, there is no copper for wires, no lithium for batteries, no uranium for baseload power. Starve exploration, and we starve the future.
The real risk isn’t in drilling holes—it’s in failing to drill them. The world’s faucets are running, but the reservoir is dropping. The only question that remains is whether we have the vision and courage to dig the next well before the water stops.
For those still with me at the end of this essay, here’s the wry truth in one line:
“Exploration: the riskiest bet we can’t afford not to make.”
Gold gets the spotlight. Silver gets the surprise attack.
Lately, a quiet tremor has been running through the metals market — not quite a roar, not yet a stampede, but a shift that’s caught the attention of those who know how to listen for the deeper rumble.
As gold flirts with all-time highs and physical inventory on the Comex continues to dwindle, another metal has slipped into position behind it: silver. And if history is any guide, that’s when things get interesting.
The Ratio That Roars
The gold-to-silver ratio, currently hovering around 99:1, is a flashing signal to seasoned metals watchers. This ratio — how many ounces of silver it takes to buy one ounce of gold — has only breached these levels a handful of times in modern history. Each time, it preceded a violent correction. Not in gold. In silver.
In 2008, the ratio hit 84. Within a year, silver doubled. In 2020, it breached 125 during peak COVID panic. Silver exploded shortly after.
Now, with gold becoming harder to lease, roll, or deliver — and silver still relatively available — some speculate that a shift is coming. Not gradually. Not politely. But kinetically.
Kinetic Capital: The Role Reversal
Gold is the store of value. The deep reserve. The static capital.
Silver? Silver is the pressure valve. When trust in paper markets frays, when delivery fails or premiums spike — silver moves. And when it moves, it doesn’t ask permission.
In 2011, silver went from $18 to nearly $50 in under a year. Not because gold led, but because belief cracked. Demand shifted. Leverage unwound. And the second fiddle started swinging like a saber.
We may be seeing echoes of that now:
Inventories are falling.
Delivery pressure is building.
Central banks are stocking up gold — and the shadow trade is sniffing around silver.
Not a Conspiracy — a Cycle
Let’s be clear: this isn’t about silver being “suppressed” by some nefarious cabal. That narrative is worn thin.
But structurally, silver is smaller, more industrially consumed, and thinner in liquidity than gold. That makes it volatile — and volatility is where opportunity lives, especially for investors and explorers who know how to ride the rip.
This isn’t just about prices. It’s about positioning. If gold is the safe bet for a nervous world, silver is the swing trade for a restless one.
What It Means for Explorers
For those of us in the trenches — geologists, explorers, financiers of the rocks that power our world — this is a blinking green light. Investors love a comeback story, and silver’s got one written into its veins.
The question is not if silver will run again. The question is: are we staked, staffed, and ready when it does?
Final Thought
If gold is the sentinel guarding wealth, silver is the insurgent — underestimated, undervalued, and when the moment is right… unleashed.
So tighten your boots, dust off the maps, and maybe—just maybe—rethink that silver project you shelved in 2016.
Because when the pressure releases, it won’t be polite.
Why Bitcoin’s Glitter Fades While Gold (and Critical Minerals) Keep the Lights On
Introduction: The Digital Mirage vs. Earth’s Treasury
There’s a great modern irony unfolding: a generation raised on instant downloads and swipe-left attention spans has fallen head over heels for digital “currencies” backed by… nothing. Enter Bitcoin and the crypto carnival—neon-lit, meme-fueled, and increasingly mistaken for sound investment.
Meanwhile, the quiet titans—gold, silver, uranium, lithium, cobalt, and other critical minerals—are doing the heavy lifting, literally powering our homes, vehicles, and technologies… with hardly a TikTok in their name.
So what gives? Why does the speculative sparkle of crypto outshine the grounded value of the periodic table? And why should smart money be getting back to basics—into assets you can dig up, hold in your hand, or build a civilization on?
Let’s dig in.
Bitcoin: The Mirage in the Machine
Bitcoin was sold as digital gold. But while it may share scarcity by design, it lacks everything else that gives gold its enduring status: physicality, utility, and millennia of trust.
Speculative by Nature: Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. It’s not a claim on anything, produces no yield, and its price is based purely on belief—an elegant code wrapped in mystique and memes.
Volatile as a Vegas Weekend: Your retirement plan shouldn’t depend on tweets from billionaires or Reddit threads named “YOLO Options.”
Zero Use Value: Can you build an EV battery with Bitcoin? Fuel a power plant? Nope. It’s just data in the ether—no matter how many laser eyes grace your profile pic.
Crypto may be digital wizardry, but the economy doesn’t run on wizardry. It runs on wires, steel, rare earth magnets, and minerals mined from the bedrock of reality.
Gold: The Original Store of Value
Gold, on the other hand, doesn’t need a pitch deck. It’s the OG of money metals.
Intrinsic and Timeless: From ancient pharaohs to central banks, gold has been the store of value when the chips are down and empires fall.
Finite and Tangible: It’s rare, it’s real, and it doesn’t disappear in a server outage.
Crisis-Proof: Gold has weathered inflation, war, pandemics, and digital delusions. You don’t need a password to access it—just a safe.
It’s not flashy. It’s not cool. But it’s real. And in the end, reality always wins.
Critical Minerals: The Future Isn’t Digital—It’s Physical
Now let’s talk about the real “cryptos”—the ones buried in the crust, not the cloud. Lithium, cobalt, uranium, copper, silver, and the rare earths that make modern life possible.
Uranium: Fuels the cleanest baseload energy on Earth. You can’t build a decarbonized future without it.
Lithium & Cobalt: The blood and bones of battery tech. No electric cars, phones, or green grids without them.
Rare Earths: Every wind turbine, smartphone, and F-35 jet has them. They’re not rare in occurrence, but rare in processing, politics, and supply chains.
Silver: Half money metal, half industrial workhorse—used in solar, medicine, and high-tech gear.
These aren’t speculations. They’re necessities. The market may not be hyped, but that’s the opening for those with vision.
Why Younger Investors Miss the Mark
Younger investors are attracted to crypto because it’s:
Easy to access
Shiny and disruptive
Marketed as anti-establishment
But the truth? It’s highly centralized, insecure, and largely controlled by a few tech oligarchs and algorithmic traders. Crypto promises freedom, but delivers volatility and groupthink.
Meanwhile, investing in real assets requires homework, patience, and—God forbid—a look at a drill map. But that’s where the real wealth lies: in things the world cannot live without.
Smart Money Knows: You Can’t Mine on a Blockchain
Institutions, billionaires, and governments aren’t hoarding NFTs. They’re buying copper projects in Chile, locking down uranium offtakes, and scrambling for lithium concessions like it’s the second gold rush. Why? Because they know:
Real value lies in the physical world.
It takes steel to build. It takes fuel to move. It takes minerals to electrify, digitize, and defend nations.
Final Thoughts: Get Grounded
Crypto may be sexy, but it’s skating on speculation. Meanwhile, the value of mined materials is growing every day—quietly, steadily, inevitably—as the demands of a technological and energy-hungry planet increase.
So the next time you’re tempted to invest in a jpeg or a vapor coin, ask yourself:
Can this power a nation, build a grid, or survive an economic shock?
If not, maybe it’s time to come back to Earth. Literally.
Mark Travis is a Certified Professional Geologist, sober explorationist, and unapologetic advocate for the rocks that run the world. Follow his musings at www.mineralexplorationgeology.com and on LinkedIn for more gritty truths and geologic gospel.
Mineral Exploration Geology: Unlocking the Earth’s Potential
Mineral exploration is the foundation of the critical minerals supply chain. Geologists play a pivotal role in identifying deposits of rare earth elements, lithium, cobalt, and uranium—materials essential for modern technology and national security. Recent advancements in geophysical and geochemical techniques have accelerated the discovery of these resources. For instance, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has identified 50 critical minerals vital to the economy, many of which remain untapped.
The Trump administration’s executive orders have emphasized the need to prioritize exploration on federal lands. By streamlining permitting processes and reducing regulatory bottlenecks, the government aims to encourage private-sector investment in exploration projects. This approach not only accelerates discovery but also reduces reliance on foreign imports, particularly from nations like China, which currently dominate the global supply chain.
Domestic U.S. Mineral Production: Building a Resilient Supply Chain
The United States has vast reserves of critical minerals, yet domestic production has historically lagged due to regulatory and economic challenges. In 2023, U.S. mineral production contributed over $105 billion to the economy, with crushed stone leading the way. However, the nation remains 100% import-reliant for at least 15 critical minerals.
The Trump administration’s policies aim to reverse this trend by leveraging the Defense Production Act to boost domestic production. Federal lands with known mineral deposits are being prioritized for development, and new funding mechanisms are being introduced to support mining and processing projects. For example, the Brook Mine in Wyoming is set to become a significant source of gallium, germanium, and scandium, reducing dependence on Chinese imports.
Investment Opportunities: A New Frontier
The push for critical minerals has created a fertile ground for investment. The establishment of a dedicated critical minerals fund through the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation is a game-changer. This fund aims to attract private capital to projects that enhance domestic production capabilities.
Uranium production, in particular, has seen renewed interest. Energy Fuels, a leading U.S. company, is ramping up operations to meet growing demand for nuclear energy. The company is also diversifying into rare earth elements processing, creating a comprehensive critical minerals hub. These initiatives align with the “America First” policy, which seeks to strengthen national security and economic independence.
Challenges and Opportunities
While the outlook is promising, challenges remain. The high cost of developing new mines, coupled with environmental concerns, poses significant hurdles. Additionally, China’s dominance in the midstream processing of critical minerals creates vulnerabilities in the supply chain.
However, the U.S. has the tools to overcome these obstacles. By fostering public-private partnerships, investing in research and development, and leveraging its vast natural resources, the nation can build a resilient and sustainable critical minerals industry.
Conclusion: A Path Forward
The Trump administration’s focus on critical minerals represents a bold step toward securing America’s economic and national security. By prioritizing exploration, boosting domestic production, and creating investment opportunities, the U.S. is well-positioned to lead in this vital sector. While challenges persist, the potential rewards far outweigh the risks, making this an exciting time for the industry and the nation as a whole.
Leading up until the 1860’s silver had a set price, about $1.29 per ounce. And it had stayed that price since 1792 with the inception of the Mint Act. What changed in the 1860’s to bring about the first drastic price change? And what effect did that change have on the Western US?
Silver Price – keys events in the last one and a half century
Historically speaking, the price of precious metals has been a currency base and set price by the government. Of course, until Nixon fianlly floated the dollar and removed the gold standard altogether in the early 1970’s. But that is later on in the story, so let’s rewind to the start again.
The first significant change in silver price after setting it’s price with the Mint Act at $1.29/ounce was the US Civil War. The debt from war drove the price of silver up. In tandem with this was budding silver mining in Nevada, which became a state at the same time that the Comstock Lode in Virginia City was taking off. Seemingly over night, silver price had tripled ($2.94/ounce) and supergene silver ores in Nevada were ripe for the picking. Not only did Virginia City take off at this time but other towns such as Belmont, Eureka, and Austin in Central Nevada were getting their start during this era as well.
The bimetallic monetary system from the 1792 Mint Act began to unravel with Coinage Act of 1873 which effectively de-monetized silver. This in turn created weakness in demand and with increased silver production in the Comstock and elsewhere throughout Nevada this led to a steady declining price. Still more government policy, in the Sherman Silver Act of 1890, attempted to correct for a price that had dipped below its previous fiat of $1.29/ounce thru the purchase of silver and minting of coins. However, this policy ultimately resulted in the Panic of 1893.
The complete abandonment of silver within a bimetallic monetary system came about thru the Gold Standard Act of 1900. Gold became the sole precious metal where paper notes could be exchanged for gold on demand. Thus, silver continued its decline in price lasting nearly until the end of WWII but seeing a nadir during the Great Depression.
One noteworthy price rebound was a brief spike centered around the war debt from World War 1. During this time the Monitor Belmont Mining Company built a flotation mill on the site of the orginal Highbridge Mill at Belmont, NV (circa 1915). This brief episode capitalized on the price rebound of silver and reprocessed some of the old mine dumps as well as dewatered some old mine level for additional underground mining efforts.
Monitor-Belmont Mill, Belmont, NV (built 1915 on site of original Highbridge Mill)
The turning point for silver came about thru the Bretton Woods agreement in 1944, where countries adopted the dollar as the world’s reserve currency backed by gold, which was set at $35/ounce by FDR (a devaluation of the metal by 70% at that time). Again, throughout Nevada there was a brief lived interest in silver district such as Belmont, Tonopah, Austin, and Eureka during this war time era.
Interestingly enough, the majority of the silver mining that put Nevada, “the Silver State”, on the map, came from the period of time when silver price was at historic lows. Aside from the initial spike in price due to the Civil War, silver mining was continually chasing down a declining silver price until the Great Depression. Any and all silver mines and deposits from that time would have suffered from a continual need to mine more and more high grade ores. This continual pressure would have driven many out of business and forced many to leave much that is economic today still in place.
By the time Nixon completely dissolved the Gold Standard in the early 1970’s, silver had already benefited from several decades of rebound. So by the time the Hunt Brothers caused a run on physical silver bullion by 1979 we still haven’t seen its equal. When you adjust for inflation, peak silver price in 1979 is nearly $42/ounce in today’s money.
So it would seem that silver has seen a long-lived macro bull market from its nadir in Great Depression era. And this would be true at face value except for one important fact. Silver’s base price of $1.29/ounce, when adjusted for inflation, is closer to $6/ounce in today’s money. This means that since the end of the Civil War until the end of the Gold Standard was simply one big silbver price trough. And realistically, in today’s electrification future since the Dot Com era and now with solar panels and EVs becoming so much more prevalent, we are finally in an era where a) the government is not price fixing silver’s value and b) the industrial worth of the metal can be freely expressed in terms of it’s value outside of a monetary system.
Additionally, silver is mined moreso as a byproduct theses days; chiefly from gold mines that aren’t mining for the white-colored metal. In the Silver State there are several abandoned silver-dominant districts that has been entirely overlooked by gold exploration companies time and again. And as I’ve written in a previous article, these silver-dominant systems could also be an excellent source for other critical minerals.
Below are some charts for reference with links to the source of this data. Each chart is logrithmic and inflation adjusted with recessions marked out in grey. These are 100 year charts, so they don’t reach as far back as my original data set above, but they tell the story nonetheless.
Mineral Exploration Geology - finding value in the world around us 