Where do you guys/girls think mining is headed?

I am kind of leaning towards a more inflationary view and think long-term GOLD wouldnt be too bad.

I say that mostly based at global inflation at heart, the heavy depreciation of the dollar, the continued depeciation of the dollar due to foriegn countries slashing their dollar holdings, among other things.

Id say this might hold for 3 years, give or take a year.

Hmm, I was thinking gold for maybe another year; interesting to see another point of view. What about copper and zinc?

Personally, I think copper will continue upwards because it's used extensively in construction (China and other emerging markets)

But I really don't have a clue about zinc. Haha.

wait till BHP Billiton takes Rio Tinto and see what happens to commodity prices (not really gold, but iron ore etc)

Well look at zinc prices vs production costs, it's becoming less economically viable to keep the mine open, and articles are already coming out that firms with zinc mines are looking to close them. Articles even stated that zinc prices need to be above $1 at least to keep a large enough profit margin to recover the initial capex.

So wouldn't the increasing number of mines closing drive the prices up for zinc; thus increasing the profit for the mines that actually continue?

iron ore will be very interesting to see. some people have some very big bets on it and there has been a lot of very speculative growth in the field lately trying to meet booming demand. i've been watching fortescue and the paper billions its sitting on and am very interested to see if its for real... phil falcone claims to believe so.

the chinese steel mills are buying everything they can at the moment, but theres a lot of smoke and mirrors to them... they've got deep pockets and have been circling a lot of big names but never pull the trigger on anything. political red tape seems to never be very far away; i wouldnt trust them to hold up on the long term contracts they've signed with guys like andrew forrest.