Byron King on Europe's Energy Nightmare
And now for some more Fatal Conceits…When the Nord Stream pipelines were sabotaged last week (Sept. 26), we immediately fired off an email to energy and resource investor, geopolitical expert and all round man of letters, Byron King. Regular listeners (and readers) will recognize Byron as the man who called out “Germany’s Energy Stalingrad” during our Winter Catastrophe summit. That was back in December of 2021, when European technocrats were still guffawing over suggestions that their green pipe dreams and over-reliance on Russian gas might present some problems in the near future…Fast forward to… well, the near future… and lo! Energy prices have gone parabolic on the continent as nations scramble to “weaponize” every strategic advantage they have, be they cubic feet of gas, global supply chains or greenbacks…Byron responded almost immediately… despite the fact that he was at the time kicking rocks deep in the heart of Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountain range on a mining expedition. We caught up with Byron as soon as he landed back in the US to get his take on what’s happening over in Europe, and what it could mean for folks on both sides of the Atlantic as ol’ General Winter enters the fray.We hope you enjoy the conversation…Cheers,Joel BowmanHost of the Fatal Conceits PodcastThank you for reading Bonner Private Research. This post is public, so feel free to share it with comrades and compatriots alike...Joel Bowman:Well, welcome back to another episode of the Fatal Conceits Podcast, dear listener, a show about money, markets, mobs and manias, not necessarily and certainly not always in that order. If you haven't already done so, please head over to the Substack page, at BonnerPrivateResearch.substack.com. There, you can sign up for plenty of daily articles from Bill Bonner. We also have lots of research reports courtesy of Dan Denning and Tom Dyson, and of course, many more episodes and conversations just like this under the Fatal Conceits podcast tab at the top of the page.It's my pleasure to welcome back to the show today a long-time friend. Mr. Byron King is an energy and resource expert, the editor of the Lifetime Income Report, and all-round man of letters. Mr. King, welcome back to the show, sir. How do you do?Byron King:I'm doing very well. Greetings, thank you. And thank you, everyone out there who's watching, listening, reading the transcript, whatever. Appreciate it.Joel Bowman:Always a pleasure to have you on, Byron. I always feel like you've probably forgotten more about whatever our given subject is than I may ever know. So, thanks again for taking the time. You and I were catching up on the state of the world recently while you were on tour down in a rock-and-mineral-kicking expedition of some sort, down in the heart of Mexico. How was your trip and what did you find?Byron King:Oh, well, thank you for even bringing it up. Yeah, I went to the legendary Sierra Madre of Central Mexico. Most people, when they think of Sierra Madre, they think, “Oh yeah, the Humphrey Bogart movie, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, where these desperados are out there and they're fighting over gold and whatever, and in the end, everybody kills everybody else and the gold dust blows away in the wind.” It's a real morality tale there. But there really is a Sierra Madre, and it is a really, really rugged range of mountains in Central Mexico, pretty much just south of Texas. And it extends, oh, I don't know, 800, 900 miles south. There's the Gulf Coast of Mexico, then there's the Pacific Coast of Mexico, and then there's this big mountain range in the middle, and that's the Sierra Madre.And it is an extension of the Rocky Mountains, and it is filled with minerals, and people have been mining great stuff there for literally 500 years. And I visited a company, I'll just name the name because it's a publicly-traded company. It's a nice company, Avino, A-V-I-N-O, silver and gold. And they are, I think, the oldest mine, you might say, in possibly the Western Hemisphere. The mine was found by the Spanish, Portuguese. I mean, the Native Americans, they were digging ore even before that. I mean, that's how the Incas got their gold and all that.But in 1558, Cortés, who burned his ships, and his conquistadors were making their way across the Sierra Madre. No maps, no nothing, just native guides, looking for whatever is over the next hill. And one night, they were camped out and somebody literally spilled the wine. I mean, they'd knocked over a bucket of wine or whatever. And everybody was mad because, "Hey, dude, you spilled the wine, man."Joel Bowman:Party foul.Byron King:Yeah, terrible. The next morning, they wake up, the sun is coming up, and they look where the wine had spilled, and there's elemental native silver just sort of cropping out from the ground there. And it was like, "Whoa. We spilled the wine, and God graced us with silver." So, they named the place Avino, as in vino being wine. But then Avino in Spanish means “it comes.” So, it's kind of a play on words, it comes from the wine. We've spilled the wine, and God gave us the silver. They started mining silver there in the 1560s. 1560s, think about that. Do the math. And they mined there for several hundred years, as much as they could. They didn't have the high explosives, they didn't have modern techniques or anything else. They were just chasing veins. Pulled a lot of silver, gold, lead, other minerals out of there.And then after the Mexican Revolution, nothing happened for decades and decades. And then in the late 1900s, well, yeah, from about 1968 on, some people started the mine back up. There's a group called Avino which is running the operation now. They deal with everything. You got your labor issues, you got your Mexican jurisdiction issues, you got logistical issues, everything else, but it's an up and running mine. And even in a low metals price market, they're making money. What I like about them is first, we got there, we suited up, we went 2,000 feet down to the rock face of the mine, down this spiral decline. It was a total gas. And they've got beautiful ore. It's copper, zinc, lead, silver, gold. And it's the gift that keeps on giving. I look at Avino as sort of a call on future higher metal prices in that regard.There's a little plug, but it was fascinating geology. It's great geology. It was incredible history. And that was just one part of the trip. Another part of the trip, we went way into the outback of the Sierra Madre and saw this silver exploration site, tiny, little Canadian company that's working there, but gorgeous, gorgeous geology. I mean, it's just this granodiorite that intruded into this limestone. And the contact edge is what's called a skarn, and just unbelievable mineralization. It's destined to be one of those multi-hundred million ounce plays, if not multi-billion ounce plays. I mean, the Sierra Madre, like I said, is the gift that has been giving for 500 years. That's what I do in my spare time, is travel around and look at rocks.Joel Bowman:Yeah, yeah, kicking rocks, collecting stories. That's fantastic. Just as you were speaking, and with the enthusiasm that you're speaking with and the depth of knowledge that you have, I'm just recalling one of our recent conversations in which you were lamenting the dearth of expertise graduating from the US in the hard sciences right now. It's not sufficient to just have these gifts that keep giving. You've got to have the human capital and the knowledge to be able to go in, do the drilling, do all that work that you know so well.Byron King:Oh my goodness, since you brought it up. I mean, I'm giving a talk in the not-too-distant future in Las Vegas with our good friend and colleague, Jim Rickards. There's an event in Las Vegas, and they asked me what's the topic of my talk, and I said, "Well, I think the title is going to be, What Would Admiral Rickover say?" Hyman Rickover, the father of the Nuclear Navy. He wrote a book in 1959,… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/subscribe
