Events - Vancouver gold show
I figure I’ll continue my (seven? eight?) year streak of attending the Vancouver Gold Show this week. Given the annihilation of the junior miner sector in the past six months, it’ll be interesting to take a pulse of the show. Will it be swarming with contrarians, confident in the imminence of better times? Or will it be relatively dead — the public having more to worry about than how to invest their capital? (Like, oh, keeping their jobs.)
On that topic, Jim Stanford had a good article on how unemployment lags in the economic cycle, meaning that even after economists pronounce the rebound has begun… non-economists as a whole won’t feel it until after the recovery is well underway.
Furthermore — and I had forgotten to consider this in my own thinking — the Canadian economy has to grow at 2.5% per year to avoid an increase in unemployment. This is because we have annual population growth of roughly 1.5%, and a bit of productivity growth as well. (In contrast, due to its shrinking population, Japan can probably grow at 1% a year with stable employment rates.)
As for the gold show, I encourage readers to check it out, even if just for the entertainment value — it’s free, after all, and you get to see a diverse cross-section of society. Heck, I ran into my old high school physics teacher there, once. And with all the colourful hucksters pitching their mining companies, you can be sure that if nothing else, it’s shysterrific…! 