The scam enabled by today’s financial ““markets”” coupled with lots of easy cheap credit flowing to big monied interests is every bit as egregious as the company store of old; only today’s victims are mostly blind to the way that the system is rigged against them.

Run this scam long enough and one day we’ll discover that the banks and their proxy agents — private equity funds, hedge funds, endowments, and family offices, etc — own all of the productive farmland, all of the mines, all of the oil wells, all of the timberland, and every other means of primary wealth production.

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The idea of an 'industrial economy' is an extremely recent human invention. And we’ve staked quite a lot on its continuation.

But it faces a massive predicament: It’s running out of resources.

When talking about the “economy”, we're really referring to the flow of goods and services — which are themselves entirely dependent on energy. No energy = no goods and services = no economy. It’s really that simple.

So to track where we are in this story, put on your ‘energy goggles’. If you do, you can discover quite a lot.

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For precious metals investors looking to increase their exposure to this asset class beyond owning bullion or gold and silver ETFs, mining companies are a natural consideration. Their prices usually move much more dramatically in response to smaller price moves in the underlying metals they mine. In a bull market, it's very possible for the share prices of these companies to increase by hundreds of percents within a year or two.

But there are a lot of gold and silver mining companies out there, many of which are small operators. Risk abounds in this sector. And for the past half-decade, most of these companies have been absolute widow-makers for investors. How do we identify which companies are worth considering and which should be avoided? How (if at all) should the small investor go about gaining exposure to precious metals mining companies?

To address this, Dr. Leanne Baker, former mining analyst at Solomon Smith Barney and current director of Agnico Eagle Mines Ltd, joins the podcast this week.

Click the play button below to listen to Chris' interview with Leanne Baker (46m:16s).

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There's no way to sugarcoat the dismal performance of the precious metals in recent months. But a revisitation of the reasons for owning them reveals no cracks in the underlying thesis for doing so.

In fact, there are a number of new compelling developments arguing that the long heartbreak for gold and silver holders will soon be over.

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Look across the universe of equities these days and it's hard to find a stock sector more thoroughly hated by investors than precious metals mining companies.

They are supposed to act as leveraged investments on the price of the precious metals. However, on average, the sector has underperformed the price action in gold in silver over the past several years. In fact, many miners have been absolute widowmakers.

On top of that, as the stock market has powered to new highs over recent months, many miners and mining indexes have sunk to multi-year lows.

What gives?

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