Strategic Intelligence Feed

Platinum set an all time high of 2,923 dollars an ounce on the twenty sixth of January this year. It trades near 1,665 today. That is a fall of about forty three percent in under nine months, and it happened without a single significant thing going wrong on

At the end of September the Treasury had 7.12 trillion dollars of bills outstanding, which is 22.4 percent of all marketable federal debt. At the end of 2022 the same share was 15.4 percent. The Treasury's own borrowing advisory committee recommends the bill share stay

American farm debt is forecast at 605.1 billion dollars this year. Adjusted for inflation, that is about six percent above the previous peak, which was 1980. The year 1980 is not an arbitrary comparison. It is the year immediately before the worst agricultural credit collapse in modern American history.

American steel mills ran at 78.3 percent of capacity in the week to the third of October, producing 1,801,000 net tons. Output is up 5.3 percent so far this year. Imports are down 19.6 percent. Hot rolled coil sells for about 1,220 dollars a

On the fourteenth of July the grid operator that runs the electricity market from Chicago to the Atlantic held its capacity auction for the 2028 and 2029 delivery year. Capacity is not energy. It is a payment made to a generator simply for existing and being available on the worst

On the eighth of September the price reporting agency that most of the lithium market uses changed how it samples Chinese inventory. Reported stocks of lithium carbonate went from 78,800 tonnes to 175,000 overnight. No metal moved. Futures on the Guangzhou exchange fell more than fourteen percent in

Copper set a record on the London Metal Exchange last month at 14,875 dollars a tonne, and a record in New York at 6.83 dollars a pound. The International Copper Study Group, which does this for a living, expects the refined market to run a surplus of about

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange delisted one of its gold futures contracts this month. It was called Gold Enhanced Delivery, it had been listed since April 2020, and it died with no open interest at all. Nobody noticed, and that is the interesting part, because of what it was built to

The United States government owns 261,498,926 fine troy ounces of gold, about 8,133 tonnes. On the Treasury's own books that holding is carried at 42.2222 dollars an ounce, a price fixed by statute in 1973, which values the entire national gold reserve at 11,

The Baltic Exchange's average earnings figure for very large crude carriers was 722,946 dollars a day on the eighteenth of September. A year earlier it was 79,700. The progression through this year runs 198,000 dollars in July, 272,000 in August, about 449,000 in

The Democratic Republic of the Congo produces roughly three quarters of the world's mined cobalt. In February last year its minerals regulator suspended all cobalt exports, industrial and artisanal alike, on the stated grounds that there was too much stock on the market. The suspension was extended twice

Anglo American agreed in May to sell its Australian steelmaking coal business to Dhilmar for up to 3.875 billion dollars, with 2.3 billion in cash at completion and the rest contingent on prices over five years. Together with an earlier sale of its Jellinbah stake the company will