Stewie, my post of July 16th gives a background of US status regarding the debt ceiling & Exchange Stabilization Fund etc. that might be of some interest to US shareholders.

Regarding exit strategy, this will depend on several factors, the main one being the mother lode anomaly that shows conductivities of 16 & 18 milliradians. I personally believe that China would be the biggest interested person. If this is the case and the final decision is cash + shares, then selling off some shares per year would save tax rather than one fell swoop for your balance. You mention investing in stable countries. I think Peru would not want to upset China with a sudden excessive mining tax, and I think Peru is quite stable. If we have a world class mine I would give some serious thought to keeping shares in that stable country, given the world's fiat currency disasters, and the history of the US confiscating gold in 1934.

What is truth, said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for the answer!

Sailsman & other posters speak of taking the money and investing in better things. When has anyone such as Sculpin, a person with such valuable mining experience, seen such a more promising mining opportunity? So sticking with the buyer may be a decision to weigh carefully. Tesoro may last for many, many years. Also we don't know if Tesoro contains any other rare metals as well.

Precious metals will outperform anything on the present radar, barring a sudden source of cheap hydrogen. I would like to outline some paragraphs from a very interesting article printed yesterday by Ted Butler, with some surprising facts:

www.butlerresearch.com "My sense is that the European debt crisis and the clash over the US debt ceiling and deficit have had the unintended consequence of instilling doubt in the minds of many where that doubt never existed. Confidence is a tricky thing; hard to earn, easy to lose. Perhaps people should have been more concerned about debt and financial matters earlier, but more are currently as a result of recent headlines. This undermines the confidence needed to continue to buy and hold paper debt obligations. Maybe this confidence is not lost overnight, but it does erode gradually and enhances the chance a panic will come at some point. In a genuine financial panic, it is hard for me to conceive how people won’t flock to hard assets, particularly precious metals.".................................again.......

"There is less silver bullion inventory in the world than there is gold bullion inventory; around one billion ounces of silver versus three billion ounces of gold. Common sense would suggest that an item more rare than another similar item would reflect that relative rarity in price. While silver has vastly outperformed gold over any reasonable time period over the past ten years, the rarity of silver is vastly under appreciated."

"While much more silver is mined and produced each year than gold, when one considers the fact that silver is an important industrial commodity compared to gold, a different picture emerges."

"The most important factor to consider in deciding between silver and gold is the price of each. Because gold is so much more expensive than silver, the dollar valuations of each are distorted. At current prices and the amount of gold and silver bullion inventories in the world, there is more than 120 times more gold in the world than silver in dollar terms. What this means, among other things, is that it takes a lot more money to move the gold market than it does to move the price of silver."

So perhaps with your cash received, one might want to transfer some wealth protection into silver. Unfortunately at the present time the silver market is also heavily manipulated by Goldman Sachs, J.P.Morgan etc. but with China coming on this month, this may not be true when you look at your big fat cheque!