You COULD also say that an eventual attack on the JP Morgan gold short will make the price of gold spring up... if you're into conspiracy theories, that is. I'm on the fence, having listened to that Maguire interview on King World News.

We saw with subprime, in the past couple years, that even when everyone KNOWS the market is distorted, it can still take 2 years for everything to finally fall apart. People were predicting doom in subprime over a year before the market finally crashed. You could say that the credit boom of the last 10 years is a market distortion that has to be killed off, too - so where's our deflationary spiral? Will it ever come?

I think perhaps, demographics might also be at play a little bit of a role in the price of gold. 3 billion dirt-farming peasants are being transformed into 3 billion westernized middle-class consumers, and you'd think that gold is enough of a cultural universal that this will cause increased demand, the same as we're seeing with everything from steel to copper.

But if gold goes up to $1500, then it becomes economical to mine at $1000... rule of thumb is, the long-term average price of the commodity is 1.5 times the cost of production. If there's no more gold to mine at $300, they'll start mining it at $1000. South Africans will drill right down to the earth's core if they have to.

Who knows? There's a lot of upside in Century right now outside of any gold price surge. We're happy with the status quo.