The moves in commodity prices have not been lost on one of our favouite bears, Jeremy Grantham. The famed British hedge fund manager spoke virtually to a conference in Sydney yesterday, where he lived up to his billing by saying that US equities were in an AI hype-driven speculative bubble, the probability of a US recession is 70% and that he would be “very careful with real estate all over the world” given that a multi-decade bull market in bonds has driven valuations to “crushingly high multiples of family income”. Grantham singled out commodities as the investment bright spot by suggesting that we now live in a “world of shortages” and that “we are not going to be rolling in commodities ever again.” “We don’t have enough metal to green the world economy… we don’t have enough lithium, cobalt, nickel or copper.”
On the same day that Grantham was speaking, property developer Tim Gurner was also giving his two cents worth at a conference across town. Gurner sparked outrage on the platform formerly known as Twitter by saying that “unemployment has to jump 40 – 50 percent in my view. We need to see pain in the economy… We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around… Tradies have definitely pulled back on productivity. They have been paid a lot to do not too much in the last few years, and we need to see that change.”
Hellbound and Down 