As many folks know, Claude and I have a goldmine that we haven’t worked in many years. Why not? Simple reason: doesn’t pay. Why not? Simple answer: to make a gold mine pay, you need OSHA clearance, among other things. You need a license to exploit mineral rights, even on your own property. The biggest problem is, you don’t want to advertise where your mine is located — that’s inviting disaster in a hurry. The other increasingly obvious reason is that we’re just too dang elderly for all that climbing and hiking and bending and waterlogged drenchings and cold misty mornings. On the other hand, a few expeditions in there every so often wouldn’t be too bad. Here’s the deal: we can’t take in a workshop — it’d reveal the location of the mine, the very last thing you’d want to do. One more major piece of information weighing in rather heavily…gold is at the bottom of a price-test, and that means people are not interested in buying it right now. The public only buys a thing when it’s at the top of its price range, so when gold goes up and up and up, they’ll eventually buy — right at the tippy-top of the market. Then, quite predictably, when gold goes back down, as it always does when traders take a profit on the way up, they sell. Pardon my chuckles. So the gold mine has sat for several decades with nobody seemingly interested. But all of a sudden, we’ve had three inquiries about the mine, all from the same general direction…
Asia.
That’s right, Asia. I didn’t know why, until some friends came by for a visit. Seems that a lot of business people in Asia, Europe, Middle East and South America are all of a sudden making a lot of money, more than they can hope to hold onto, and far more than they’ll be allowed to keep if they expose it all in one place. So they need someplace to hide their money.
Another way of saying that is, they need to put their money where their government can’t get at it for a while, and where it looks like it isn’t money.
What can I tell you? Rich people have problems that poor people never have to deal with. That’s why Morgan and I gave away the lottery ticket. Money brings worry.
But no money also brings worry, and that’s why Claude and I developed the gold mine and yes, it has a name. We don’t publish the name, because it would make it all too easy to find it on a county map, see? Worst thing in the world would be to have your mine featured on Google Earth Maps, eh?
Well, on the other hand, if we had our way, we’d turn the mine into a nightclub with special wine storage facilities and a specialty of mushrooms — there’s no better place to grown them than in a temperature-steady gold mine, and no better place to store wine and archival materials than in a mine.
So if you know anyone interested in putting money into a project that won’t turn a profit for a while, but will still occasionally produce a nugget or two, this might be perfect. How much money is needed? A gold or silver mine has a way of gnawing away at budget plans, but my best guess is that it would take about $400,000 over a period of maybe ten years to get the mine operating at a profit. It costs a LOT of money to get the gold out of the ground, thanks to several rather nasty and uncooperative government agencies, but what else is new? Government has the richly-deserved reputation of being inefficient, predictably unpredictable (because nobody’s running the show) and internally corrupt.
So where’s the payoff?
Ah, I rather suspected you’d get around to asking that question, and it’s about time, too. The payoff for the foreign investor is that they have some diversification of funds with a variety of safety issues in each investment area. In short, who knows what can happen?
These “umbrellas” are a time-honored custom. Just about all horrendously wealthy people have an escape plan, in case things go really, really wrong back home. That escape plan usually involves putting money into dozens of Swiss Banks or their equivalent.
Most people who do this sort of thing have no real elegance, just tons and tons of money.
This means that they’ll tend to buy artwork that resembles Lawrence Welk. It’ll be nationalistic acquisitioning and very pedestrian mediocrity, if a double whammy can be permitted here.
In short, Asians will buy Quing, Ming and Fujiwara. Totally predictably, they’ll be into ivory, jade, gold and silks. Europeans will be into European art, mostly of the 15th-18th century. Americans will buy Andy Warhol and black velvet portraits of Elvis Presley. So what else is new?
I could tell them what to buy if they were smart, but they’re only smart at making money, not at living life.
A gold mine is hard to run, and almost everyone who works there, including the foreman and the directors, will be tempted to steal at least a few nuggets a day out of there, and it could turn into the kind of nightmare that Alan had with the City of Six mine, right next to the Ruby. He lost $600,000 in a single year, due to a crooked foreman who currently resides in Argentina due to a sudden craving for a change of scenery, resulting in an equally sudden overnight move.
An absentee landlord doesn’t have a clue how much the bartender is stealing. There is no way to guarantee total honesty under ordinary conditions. Most mine backers don’t seem to care, but they should, just as much as an entertainer should be very careful to which tax or managing accountant they give total power of attorney with no oversight, a definite recipe for disaster.
So I guess we’ll hold onto the mine a while longer.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby