Did you know that copper is the leading metal to point to in terms of a recovery? Plus - can gold reach $1200 this year?

MoneyWeb: Net-net, you probably could put the word ‘inconsistent' toward most of the economic data coming out of the U.S.

The industrial numbers that came out of China a couple of weeks ago [August 10] were actually below expectations as well. While everyone wants to be bullish and the data is somewhat better than many expected, it's still not great. So I think to claim victory right now is definitely premature.

TGR: You mentioned a supply-demand imbalance. What do you see on that front?

JL: Companies are not putting money back into infrastructure. For that reason, once demand actually starts to increase, supply levels will be shockingly different from what people might expect.

SHOOT: In this article MoneyWeb predicts gold may reach $1200 in 2009. Maybe, but I wonder what the impact of vaporised credit will be on the mines and the buyers of precious metals, and of course, ordinary consumers?

clipped from mineweb.co.za John Licata: I do think we've seen some better domestic economic data, but it's premature to think we're totally out of the woods. In terms of corporate earnings, a lot of company profits might have surprised to the upside, but they're still down 50% to 70% from quarters before or the prior year. Many companies have been trying to compare Q1 and Q2. You're still not seeing dramatic differences to the upside. Quite frankly, some companies are still living within cash flow and I think that's one of the reasons why we could have a problem with supply and demand imbalances as we come to the end of 2009 and enter 2010. Unemployment is likely to keep rising. Although the last numbers were much better than anticipated, I don't think we've seen the green light that will cause people to start hiring again. We could hit 10% unemployment by the end of the year, and that's going to be a precursor to some weaker retail heading into the holiday season.