John Embry, Sprott Asset Management

I don’t understand why the majors aren't acquiring because I've never seen anything like the discrepancy in value between the big cap stocks and the small stuff. Many interesting smaller companies are trading for a song; whereas, Agnico-Eagle and Goldcorp and Kinross are aggressively valued.

The Gold Report: Some of the juniors have lost 80%.

John Embry: If you had told me we'd see this kind of carnage in the juniors while gold was still north of $800, I would have said impossible. One of the reasons is that investors are giving up and gold funds, ours included, are under redemption pressure. This creates forced selling with insufficient buying and that leads to the most depressed prices since this cycle began in 2000.

TGR: How long can this go on?

JE: I don’t know but I’ve got some that actually are selling below the cash on their balance sheets.