Historical Articles

A lot was made of mining investments in the financial papers just after the war was concluded. Part of the reason is that mines literally shut down because of the lack of available workers to do the work, who had gone overseas and been churned up in the WWII meatgrinder.

This page from the Financial Post from 1946 is interesting to scroll through, since you can see just how mining companies were evaluated. Mining shares were also listed. Many of the mines did not perform on the mining indeces, simply because the operations were too small to invest large amount of capital into. They may have paid dividends, but many of these mines had their share prices fixed by the exchanges.

By 1946, long dated provincial bonds were priced at least 10 - 20 points lower than where long dated U.S. treasuries are priced today. So its correct that bonds might be overpriced now and due for a correction, but a total collapse is probably not in the cards, if the past is any comparison.

You never know what the archives chooses to cough up, since often the search terms and the results are two different things. Search terms come out in yellow, there's page after page of mining information and stock lists. Just grab the corner image of the paper and drag it left to right, looking for yellow highlights.

Financial Post, Feb. 09, 1946

The Automatic Earth posted a video from the NFB dating back to the boom and bust of the depression era. You'll be surprised at the some of the historical facts.

One of the things people might not know from the times is that jobless men were conscripted into work camps and were forced to ride the rails to get there.

http://theautomaticearth.org/Finance/then-and-now-sunshine-and-eclipse.html

-F6