Canada just can't quite make it out of the crosshairs of the new US administration.
Canada is biggest foreign supplier of steel (lhs, blue) - just edging out the EU (lhs, orange) - and by far the biggest foreign supplier of aluminum (rhs, blue). China is NOT a big supplier... Source: Robin Brooks
Fascinating
Source: @Callum_Thomas via Jan Nieuwenhuijs
60 years of Gold and Silver price spikes.
Source: Rick Rule Rhetoric @RickRuleRulz
Diamonds vs. Gold
Source: Bloomberg
An unexpected behavior by oil...
As the red line shows, WTI is at its highest price since October. The green annotation shows that it has increased by 8% in the last few weeks. The rise of oil prices took place despite Trump win (and the subsequent "Drill, baby drill") and Scott Bessent being nominated Treasury Secretary nominee (and says the US should add 3 million barrels/day of production). So why isn't crude oil slumping and now on the verge of breaking out? Source: James Bianco, Bloomberg
An era came to a close in Europe on the first day of 2025 >>>
Russian gas exports via Soviet-era pipelines running through Ukraine came to a halt on New Year's Day, marking the end of five decades of Moscow's dominance over Europe's energy markets, as well as cheap gas that kept Germany's economy humming. The gas had kept flowing despite nearly three years of war, but Russia's gas firm Gazprom said it had stopped at 0500 GMT after Ukraine refused to renew a transit agreement. European natural gas prices have been rising all year and closed 2024 more than doubling from their February lows. There is a risk they will only keep rising now. The European Commission said the EU had prepared for the cut-off. Indeed, the EU has slashed its dependence on Russian energy since the start of the war in Ukraine by buying more piped gas from Norway and LNG from Qatar and the United States. "The European gas infrastructure is flexible enough to provide gas of non-Russian origin," a spokesperson for the Commission said. "It has been reinforced with significant new LNG (liquefied natural gas) import capacities since 2022." The biggest beneficiary of said LNG imports is, of course, the US which has seen its LNG exports to Europe soar since the Ukraine war and since the US blew up the Nordstream pipeline, making (expensive) US sourced LNG one of the few realistic alternatives for Europe. In other words, Europe has gone from relying entirely on cheap Russian gas to relying entirely on expensive US LNG. Source: zerohedge
Europe has gone from relying entirely on cheap Russian gas to relying entirely on expensive US LNG
Source: zerohedge
SILVER industrial demand to hit record high in 2024, up 56% in last 10 years
Source: Mining Visuals
