Did any NovaGold people go over to Mantra Mining?
BL: Oh, yes. Its Chairman of the Board, Rick Van Nieuwenhuyse, was of course, the driving force behind NovaGold, and I think some other ex-NovaGold people also may be involved. TGR: Rare earths are getting a lot of buzz now. Is that really a sustainable sector or is it just a flash? BL: In the long term, I think it is sustainable. The problem has always been that the market has to appreciate the sector before it is going to go anywhere. There is no rare earth bull market; no copper bull market; not even a silver bull market. There’s no investor interest in any of these sectors unless a gold bull market draws investors into the arena. Everything else is an offshoot from gold. If you recall, we didn’t have that big “uranimania” run in uranium stocks until a bull market in gold had already attracted a large number of speculative investors to the mining and resource sectors. So that’s one prerequisite. The other is that someone influential must champion the sector. Uranium started a very l
