The reserve life of a typical gold mine is no more than 10 years so the reinvestmentrate for exploration and incremental production is capital intensive.
If these managements show any traction in their reinvestmentrate, they will qualify as safer havens than tech shares selling at 25 times earnings facing cutbacks in information technology spending.
For instance, GDP growth is a result of (in addition to population growth) the income reinvestmentrate in the economy multiplied by the rate of return on that reinvestment (or the aggregate ROIC in the economy).
All this finally gets me to Google where I see a prospectively high reinvestmentrate, lasting hegemony on its internet network and the least cyclical variance in its businesses which are not reliant on annualized new product initiatives.