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JL: They're actually holding pretty well. None of these metals is exchange traded. You can't get prices for them by looking in the Wall Street Journal. So you need to take a look at the current pricing of tellurium, selenium, gallium and germanium and watch those prices. The reporting on those prices is spotty. So what I'm saying is don't watch the actual daily pricing reports. Watch the trends. In a period when base metal production is going down, it means minor metal production is also going down, by-product metal, and we're headed for a crisis here because there isn't very much and the materials we make from them tend to be ordered on a much longer term.

TGR: As an investor then, the play here is to invest in equity companies that are producing base metals. Would that be correct?

JL: Correct. That's correct.

TGR: Are there certain of these by-product minor metals that are more critical?

JL: I predicted at a recent conference that copper would hit perhaps as much as $10 a pound by 2011. Everybody said, oh, you're crazy. But I'll tell you who didn't tell me I was crazy—all the men who were on those panels. One of them said to me, you know what's wrong with your prediction? I said what? He said you're way low—we know that there are critical technologies that are now based on derivatives of copper.

And these industries are going to get a lot of publicity in the next few years because they're making cooling systems for power plants or batteries or photo cells, and they won't be able to get material. I mentioned the Prius a minute ago. Are you aware that every Prius has 64 pounds of copper on board? There are a million of them on the road. That's 32,000 tons of copper just in the Prius. Do you think you can make a car without copper? Our government has decided to continue the production of cars in Detroit. Every one of them eats more than a ton of steel, almost 100 pounds of copper, magnesium, aluminum. And if that comes from existing inventories, how long will those inventories last?

TGR: Can't you get the copper from recycling?

JL: Yes, but if you're going to get it from recycling instead of new production, you'd have to open some smelters. We don't have that kind of capacity.

TGR: If we're recycling copper, then we still don't have these by-product minor metals.

JL: That is correct because they've been extracted when they were produced the first time. No new copper smelter or lead smelter has been approved in the United States for years, maybe decades. It takes three years to do the paperwork for a copper smelter, and most copper companies with existing smelters are quite satisfied; they're not even starting the idea of a recycle. We have in America a dozen smelters for recycling battery lead that produce more than 20,000 tons a year each, more than 20,000. Anyway, the total recycled lead in America each year is over a million tons. Now you don't hear about that, do you?