This is a snip from an interview with David Morgan. I put him as one of the few strict analysts with little or no Rah Rah factor and no pre-determined point of view.

TGR: If people have cash ready to invest in equities or precious metals, would you say put all of your cash into precious metals now, and then liquidate as you want to invest in various equities? Or keep cash on hand just for equity opportunities?

DM: You can buy the precious metals themselves at almost any time. That's a different asset class than the mining equities. The mining equities generally follow the stock market to a certain point. Then comes a point—which we haven't reached yet—when the mining equities start to take on a life of their own. In other words, you'll see gold and silver mining equities generally going opposite the general stock market. At this time I think mining equities will follow the stock market down. A week or so ago I posted an article on my website about Harry Dent seeing the stock market debacle starting at the end of February. I would not be real quick to jump into the mining equities right now. But if you're not invested in the physical metal itself, I would definitely buy some. I prefer a dollar-cost-averaging approach to accumulating the precious metals.

And as far as selling the metal to buy equities goes, I would never do that. I'd do the opposite. If I have a big gain on a mining equity—say I made a three, four, five, 10-bagger—I usually turn that in precious metals. I'd rather turn paper into gold than gold into paper.

TGR: You were talking about currency of choice and in this case, gold. A lot of gold investors expect that at some point silver will stop trading as an industrial metal and start trading as a precious metal. A lot of people use the gold-silver ratio as an indicator of how rapidly silver can move up. Do you believe in that ratio and what it portends for silver?

DM: There is a lot made of the silver-gold ratio. Silver probably will reach what I call the classic, or the monetary ratio, which is 16:1. It could even get down to the natural ratio, which at this time is about 10:1, but I don't see it getting to any better ratio than that. Of course, this implies that silver is undervalued relative to gold.

When will silver take on this monetary aspect alone? That's part of what I'm writing for the March issue of The Morgan Report. It's basically looking at the silver market over the next 10 years. We have a 10-year bull market behind us and in my view we have several more years to go.

What happens is at the end of these great bull markets is you get into the euphoric or manic stage and this happens in almost all markets. You've seen it in the technology sector, when people were buying dot-com stocks that had no business plan and no equity, just an idea.

TGR: It was the new economy.

DM: Yes. So that will take place. I think we'll see the biggest run up of all time in gold and silver, especially the equities, a euphoric state of panic buying driven by fear and greed. I'll probably face a lynch mob me when I say "sell," because no one will want to trade physical metal for paper currency and I don't blame them. Anticipating this, I've already planned some techniques to use to preserve our physical metal and still allow us to sell to a strong market, but those are days ahead.

When the panic hits, gold probably will go up to $2,000 and beyond—the average person will wake up thinking, "Oh, I've got to get gold equities; I listened to my friends and I thought they were idiots and now I see the light." Many will turn to silver because it'll still affordable relative to gold.

Significant money will move in to the metals. And because silver is cheaper than gold, a lot of it will go silver, which will cause the ratio to spike relative to gold. You'll see the ratio drop from 60:1 to 50:1 to 40:1 to 35:1 to 20:1, maybe to 16:1 or 10:1 because there'll be more money, relatively speaking, moving into silver than in the past. And since silver is such a small market, any small increase in buying power will send the price far higher.

My comment: and that's one of the reasons that I will hold onto ECU with a death grip until they make me squirm with VERY high price bids!