With China coming out and releasing their gold reserves numbers, much action has taken place in the precious metals. To understand China’s intentions and to explore the precious metals arena, we interviewed Austrian economist Ronni Stöferle, and he shared his wisdom with the precious metals sector and mining companies.

Ronni shares some unbelievable facts that truly show that the mining sector is incredibly undervalued at the moment. Right now, the 16 largest gold and silver miners added up have a total market cap of $55 billion U.S. dollars. All these companies together make up nearly 80% of total mining production each year. Just to put this into perspective, Apple Inc. currently has nearly $200 billion in cash and could buy the top 16 mining companies outright 4 times over with just the cash sitting in their bank account.

This doesn’t mean prices can’t go lower, but it does exemplify how bad things have gotten and that value is here in this sector.