While natural resource miners are a natural to be a hedge against inflation,
I’m guessing Xi’s speech in China has spooked the miners as it is interpreted to be a combination of telegraphing a continued slowdown of the Chinese market coupled with the increased potential for China to start a war in the Pacific over Taiwan.
I would think that if it were only China’s aspirations for Taiwan that are involved, Vale would be less impacted, if primarily macro factors involved, they would also be punished
I have a feeling we are watching global rats leaving the sinking ship.
Ditto lithium. Much lithium now is mined in Australia. Purification to battery grade is mostly in China. A war in the Pacific would make for quite a scramble for those planning to make Electric Vehicle batteries with that lithium.
China has enormous ghost cities of apartment towers that are uninhabited. Building those took immense amounts of raw materials. Now that some of the largest builders are going bankrupt, building is halted. That directly impacts the suppliers of raw materials like steel, copper and concrete.
Wendy
Commodities are not a great hedge against inflation. Printing money is good for miners etc…commodities usually in general.
The problem is cutting inflation is bad for commodities. We are cutting inflation…even if we are doing a miserable job of cutting inflation this year.
This is going to get interesting because when not if the bond markets collapse we need to print. I was going to start an thread this morning polling people on their take of how much money is needed to bailout the global bond markets? It might not be as bad as 2009, 10 because the real estate markets outside of China are less leveraged.