Conditions in early 08 made takeover fever easy to accept and visualize. We may have easily envisioned a rapid competition to take NOT out. Now we have longer time frames, greater dilution from time and reality of drilling/assay times , and market sentiment domintated by fear and sometimes scary government responses. If you had predicted the Henry tax two years ago, you would have been seen as a candidate for anti-depressants. The current currency war will die out leaving gold prices elevated against two major flood level currencies as Western public spending and debt spiral gains acceptability as the price of domestic political peace. However, in the context of the 08 economies, world GDP growth made the then debts appear quite manageable. Today, NOT still has the same great prospects to sell, but the big buyers are fewer and have been scared to the sidelines by big government.

We have quickly evolved to governments who no longer think in terms of critical public services, but see themselves as an alternate economic engine to that recently provided by the private sector. The bizarre notion that cutting redundant and non-productive public sector spending will add to unemployment has become the self consuming elephant in the room. Mining like all private enterprise now gets lots of glad-handing but no "pension" or long term protective policy. A handful of extremely powerful institutions have throttled meaningful financial reform. This is all new, but adds up to a radically more focussed approach by the major mining companies. And most of the Western governments have not quite caught on. It will take time for this flow of red ink to find its own level. What's another billion or so to get another headline concensus (=G20). Could you imagine a BHP spending a billion to bring together the heads of 6 or 8 majoir divisions and another 12 or so department heads ?