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Https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/gold-1-700-time-buy-095843624.html
You keep saying this but the figures I've seen show HOC has a P/E ratio of 142 and Fres is only 19.43. Where are you getting your figures from?
https://www.hl.co.uk/shares/shares-search-results/f/fresnillo-usd0.50
https://www.hl.co.uk/shares/shares-search-results/h/hochschild-mining-plc-ordinary-1p
I was thinking, imagine in the old days if you had a one company owning and managing the landline infrastructure and one company selling you a phone to plug into the landline infrastructure. But the company selling you the phone charged you the equivalent of a £1k for a phone and the other company that actually enabled the phone to work by providing the infrastructure was only able to charge a consumer a relative pittance. The old telecoms model has the opposite pricing model to today. The handset (plug in phone) was cheap, the cost was the line rental and the calls. Now it is the other way around, and the pittance is all a company gets to build and maintain a costly infrastructure.
Vodafone missed a trick back in 2000. It should have bought Apple and that would have allowed it to integrate into an end-to-end telecoms business. Selling handsets that could only have been used on Vodafone networks in countries where it operated. It would have made a killing!
Amazing to think that this got to nearly £5.50 just over a month ago on 29 January. Now down 15% from that recent peak. Yet we've had a pretty good report just two days ago showing the worst is over and the future is looking brighter. Gold is up since 29 Jan too. I can't help but think someone is manipulating this share and really doesn't want it to go higher. Can't be shorters because there aren't any short positions reported. What am I missing?
Nationwide have agreed terms to buy Virgin Money for a 38% premium on the share price. If there is a serious bid for Vodafone I'd expect at least £1. I know others say this is too low but you have to be realistic. Post Brexit a lot of international investors are shunning the UK.
https://news.sky.com/story/nationwide-agrees-terms-for-2-9bn-takeover-of-virgin-money-13088922
I agree with you to a certain extent. Debt to GDP doesn't really matter as long as people are willing to lend to the government. What the Treasury has always done is when they get into trouble, which is defined by them as borrowing looking too high in current financial year, Y2 and Y3, that's all they care about, their first pot to raid is investment. The UK already has very low government investment compared to other OECD countries and the Treasury's figures only meet their debt falling as a % of GDP test in year 5 because they plan to halve it, pushing us back even further. The biggest mistake the UK made was under Osborne. We didn't have to eliminate the budget deficit caused by the financial crisis in one parliament (5 years). We could have done it over 2 parliaments and used the extra borrowing to invest. Look at our health service. 8 million on a waiting list is already affecting the growth potential of the economy because so many workers are too sick to work. Look at the housing benefit bill, currently £33bn a year. Should have invested in social housing over those 10 years and that would be much lower now. Should have used money to retrofit houses so they use less energy, particularly gas, and energy bills would be lower, giving households more spending power (UK economy is 80% services). Giving households thousands of pounds to pay gas bills is a short term solution. Gov has to keep doing that until prices fall otherwise you're back to square one.
What we do know given UK debt is 90% of GDP and was 60% of GDP in 2010 is that the idea that the government was bankrupt in 2010 was nonsense. If any person/business is bankrupt then no-one would lend them more money. Yet the market was prepared to lend a lot more money post 2010!
Government debt is 263% of GDP. The UK is about 90%. So Japan hasn't done that well to me.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_Japan#:~:text=As%20of%20March%202023%2C%20the,highest%20of%20any%20developed%20nation.
By law the Norwegian government can only spend 3% of the sovereign wealth fund per year. So that is normally a lot less than the returns on investment. We could have had a similar law here. But of course a future government could have changed that. There's always that risk. But you'd hope the voters would punish such short term thinking.
Also Margaret Thatcher didn't have to deal with an ageing population. We now spend £138bn on pensioner benefits. Plus 90% of what the NHS will spend on you during your lifetime is spent on you when your over 65. This ageing population means the NHS needs 4% above inflation just to stand still. They've had 1% a year since 2010. Add very low growth, made worse by Brexit (current GDP between 2-6% lower already, that's £20-60bn less tax revenue because the gov taxes what's earned and spent and GDP measures what's earnt) and the UK's economic model looks bust.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/ageing/articles/livinglongerhowourpopulationischangingandwhyitmatters/2018-08-13
https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/welfare-spending-pensioner-benefits/
Not sure I buy that. Margaret Thatcher had the benefit of huge north sea oil revenue that flowed into the Treasury, equivalent to 10% of all government revenue. Instead of setting up a Soverign Wealth fund like Norway she spent it on tax cuts for the rich and paying unemployment benefit for 3 million people for most of her time in office. Anyone can look good with so much extra revenue flowing in.
Two issues have affected Fres costs. One labour costs due to regulatory change forcing them to employ permanent staff instead of temporary staff. This is a one off cost increase. Second an appreciation of the Mexican Peso against the US dollar. The Mexican Peso cannot carry on getting stronger against the US dollar for ever, otherwise the US dollar becomes effectively worthless. So both costs pressures are temporary and the exchange rate may get better. I can't see costs increasing faster than the gold price.