It was a momentous week for Canadian regulators, seemingly. In a ruling on “one of the largest corporate frauds in Canadian history,” the Ontario Securities Commission slammed Sino-Forest scamsters with over $81 million in sanctions. One day later the Canadian Securities Administrators announced a nationwide total last year of nearly $70 million in penalties and a roughly equal amount in payback orders. All that sounds impressive, but a troubling question remains: How much—or, more accurately, how little—will ever be collected?

Here’s a guy who got rejected not by “virtually every university in Canada, it was every university in Canada”—and for an MBA program at that. Now chairperson of Goldcorp TSX:G, Ian Telfer credits one school’s 11th-hour offer with giving him a second shot at his career, putting an undistinguished background behind him to become a serial success story. His reflections provided inspiration to a sold-out Vancouver audience of 850 people hoping to pick up some of the magic that made him a mining legend.

Money’s appeal couldn’t be more obvious, yet coins specifically bring to mind values intrinsic, speculative or esthetic. By no means neglecting the first two, the Royal Canadian Mint has been emphasizing the third, and in ways increasingly innovative. Issuing over 200 such products each year, its “coins” have become more and more exotic. That shows in two recent releases, which can be said to source their materials from the end of the Earth and beyond.

There’s nothing like jumping into a river at the head of a waterfall—especially the Zambezi above the hundred-plus-metre drop of Victoria Falls while an airborne crew films the stunt for television—to grab people’s attention. That’s the sort of thing Iain Stewart has done, but as a means to an end. A geologist with a gift for communication, he evidently has a mission to express a sense of wonder in the science and its importance to people’s lives. But what about all those other geos lacking the resources of network TV or the advantages of charisma? Stewart discussed that in a June 18 public event at the first-ever Resources for Future Generations conference in Vancouver.

Evidently the organizers want to find common ground between disparate, even polarized, viewpoints. And Vancouver, as a world capital of mining, a burgeoning high-tech centre for clean energy and a hotbed of environmental activism, might be the ideal venue for such an endeavour. It’s here that Resources for Future Generations will assemble an international and divergent group to discuss three essentials to our survival on this planet: energy, minerals and water.

Lithium bulls faced a bearish backlash last February, when Morgan Stanley circulated a note predicting “2018 to be the last year of the global lithium market deficit, followed by significant surpluses emerging from 2019 onwards.” More pessimism rained on lithium from a report by Wood Mackenzie. Meanwhile some prognosticators talk up the solid state battery’s inevitability. Does all that indicate an end to the Li-ion battery’s quarter-century run?

“There’s gotta be a better way to do this.”
That’s a refrain James Atherton heard frequently as the Vancouver-based securities lawyer led junior resource firms through private placements. Industry consensus held it to be a laborious ordeal that diverts time and money from enterprise while shutting out smaller investors. But with inspiration borne of frustration, Atherton teamed up with Corebox creator Jonathan Longe to “revamp, streamline and automate” the process, bringing these financings into the 21st century with Capiche.io.

Probably the most facile way to dismiss a conspiracy theorist is to label the person “a conspiracy theorist.” Conventional thinking gives the term negative connotations, even though history and current events have an inconvenient tendency to reveal conspiracies in action. Ed Steer’s interest in bullion manipulation started with the Hunt brothers’ 1970s silver conspiracy. Having spent decades watching the machinations of others, the newsletter writer and Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee board member adamantly declares that “there are no markets, just interventions.”

With fresh financing and a rig en route, Margaret Lake Diamonds TSXV:DIA has drilling about to begin on its namesake project in the Northwest Territories. As with any outfit in similar circumstances, the company’s optimism has been buoyed by the performance of an illustrious neighbour, in this case Kennady Diamonds. But more objective encouragement comes from the extensive geophysics that determined the targets for Margaret Lake’s maiden drill program. Additionally, the project operator will be the same group that helped deliver success to Kennady.

There are contrarians and there are contrarians. But maybe Jayant Bhandari would be better called a controversian. As a prolific writer/commentator and an adviser to institutional investors, his comments reflect a mind unsatisfied with received wisdom. Now a resident of Singapore, his travels have taken him to 80 countries, seven of which he’s lived in. That background has influenced his perspective on a number of topics including the emerging markets—or emerging market singular. China’s the only one, he insists.