“I AM trying to find another big one,” prospector extraordinaire and reclusive gold player Mark Creasy says about his exploration plans
“I AM trying to find another big one,” prospector extraordinaire and reclusive gold player Mark Creasy says about his exploration plans.
He is sitting in his large, dishevelled office located beneath his Mosman Park home with its Swan River views – one of the most prime pieces of real estate in WA.
Mr Creasy predicts his next big find will be either gold – a metal he seems to like – iron ore or nickel.
“If you can crack one large world-class ore body you are beating the odds. Two – huge,” he said.
Mr Creasy, who sold a gold prospect and spent almost 20 years in the bush uncovering about $117 million in the mid 1990s, currently holds about 15 gold, nickel and iron ore prospects in WA (three of which he is bullish about).
His exploration spending is valued at several million dollars, an amount he plans to increase next year.
Why? To get ready for the boom period he has been positioning himself for the past six years.
He said he came to the realisation of the impending boom after a lunch with Macquarie Bank commodities analyst Jim Lennon in 1996.
“If you look at what happened to the commodity market since the war there was a big boom that lasted until 1980 then there was a bear that lasted from 1988 to 1998-99 when commodity prices just went down, down and down,” Mr Creasy said.
“The final phase of the automobile and consumer age was complete for the Americans and Europeans in 1980 and along the way the consumption of metals grew.
“Then it slowly went down reaching the huge bottom in 1988.
“Now what we are going to see is instead of just a few people getting a car, a washing machine in India and China, you are now going to see hundreds of millions.”
He argues that the growth is not just being driven by China.
“I mean they are the ones who get their name in the paper but the Indians are industrialising very, very rapidly, although, yes they are two steps behind the Chinese,” Mr Creasy said
“Then you have the Indonesians, Vietnamese, Cambodians Laotians. It’s cumulative.
“Now we are seeing the rest of Asia so it’s the worlds biggest development and that’s going to be pushing metal prices and commodity prices on the average high for the next 20 or so years.”
However, while there will be a boom there will also be big pullbacks.
Mr Creasy predicts the US dollar to slowly decline as the sole international currency of trade and, while nothing steps up in its place, there will be a strong bull market in gold. He said what would be really telling would be when the US market dropped 20 to 30 per cent.
“Everyone will get frightened even though the fundamentals are still good,” Mr Creasy told WA Business News.
However, he warned another pandemic such as SARS or a nuclear war could halt the upturn.
Mr Creasy said September 11 might have been a little overplayed, a major pandemic could really damage Asian demand.
