Jim Sinclair’s Commentary

Junior mining situations provide the majority of new reserves in both base and precious metals.

Many of these companies are now selling at prices less than the value of the sum of the parts.

The hedge funds keep up their strategy of naked short selling, having gone from normal greed to insatiable madness, wanting it all and wanting it now.

The turn in these shares will be made by the first major deals between Chinese and/or Middle East entities.

The other end game for these criminals would be the outing of those that attack from the shadows, content that they will never be identified by data as naked illegal shorts.

Mining Replaces Financial Services as Biggest Driver of M&A
By Ambereen Choudhury and Brett Foley

June 12 (Bloomberg) -- Metals are the new green on Wall Street, as mining has displaced financial services to become the biggest source of mergers and acquisitions.

The value of announced mining takeovers more than tripled to $199 billion in the first five months of 2008 from a year ago, even as the global pace of M&A dropped 37 percent, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Financial-services companies, the largest driver of merger fees for the past two years, disclosed $173.5 billion of transactions in the first five months. It's the first time mining mergers have topped the M&A table since Bloomberg began compiling the data in 1998.

``We have moved into the age of commodities,'' said Carl Hughes, a London-based partner at Deloitte & Touche LLP, who oversees the firm's energy and resources practice. ``You clearly have a large number of mining companies just generating cash and profit like there is no tomorrow.''

A $100 billion deal is ``imminently possible,'' said Shaun Treacy, who runs Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.'s global metals and mining group from London. That would be in addition to BHP Billiton Ltd.'s $147 billion unsolicited bid this year for Rio Tinto Group in the world's largest mining transaction.

``The race is on for valuable, high quality, scarce resources,'' said Treacy, 41. ``Rumors are circulating about various transactions, as there continues to be significant appetite