-- Posted 28 September, 2006 | |

The Wallace Street Journal

By DAVID BOND, Editor

Silver Valley Mining Journal

The flapping of a single butterfly's wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month's time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn't happen. Or maybe one that wasn't going to happen, does. – Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos, (pg. 141).

Wallace, Idaho – Thus did the Silver Summit 2006 butterfly, or more properly Schmetterling, flap its four-year-old wings again last week. When the financial typhoon strikes the currency and bond markets, and updrafts the commodity and metal markets, what role will we have played? Has Silver Summit become for the Silver Revolution what Gold Rush 21 was for GATA?

This question consumed many long after-hours conversations in Coeur d’Alene and Wallace this past week, as the amber wisdom flowed, the Germans and the Swiss circulating with the Yanks and the Canucks, the Aussies weighed in, the South Americans hovered and the good Chinese bought lunch.

The influence of Silver Summit 2006 clearly reverberated in Denver at the granddaddy Gold Forum a few days later, where silver, Reuters reported, stole the show, stole almighty Gold’s thunder. Here in North Idaho, John Embry described himself as “rabidly bullish on silver” poised for a run-up to new, real-time highs, Jason Hommel charted a course toward $8,000 silver in the next decade and a half, the Mogambo Guru sported a T-shirt with his battle-cry, “We Are Freaking Doomed!” and 50 exhibiting silver miners already banging on Shauna Hillman’s door to make sure they get dibs on next year’s summit.

We’ve evolved in four short years from a grand total of six presenters in a tiny room mingling with a rag-tag bunch of (and what else would they be with silver on life-support at $3.50) die-hards, to a well-heeled four-plus dozen companies and more than 600 silver die-hards from every continent on the planet. And now Silver Summit is spreading to Europe, to London on 9^th November, and on to the Continent for repeat performances next year.

The late September timing for Summit 2006 couldn’t have been better. Weather cooperated with the festivities, the crowning event of which was Mayor Ron Garitone’s marrying-off of retired Pennaluna stockbroker Jerome Bunde, 72, and Bunde’s childhood sweetheart, Carline, at the Center of the Universe in Wallace while inside at the Smoke House, virtuoso Steve Dore regaled us with precious metals boogie-woogie on the old 88. And just as the late-September sun warmed the evening’s folks, silver shook off the weight of its summer doldrums, poised for the typhoon it very soon will become.

Yes, the Schmetterling is flapping its wings. The markets were up all the following week. Have you heard the news, Barrick and big bad Ben Bernanke?