When Odd Lots hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway opened their January 29 conversation with a half-joking refrain — “Metals. Metals.” — the data backed them up. Gold at record highs. Silver at historic extremes. Copper surging more than 10% in a single session.
What made the moment remarkable wasn’t just the magnitude of the moves, but the simultaneity. These metals traditionally signal very different macro regimes. Copper is the bellwether of industrial growth. Gold is the archetypal stress hedge. Silver straddles both worlds. Yet here they were, rising together.
To explain why, the hosts turned to Jeff Currie, longtime commodity strategist and now a partner at Carlyle — a figure whose earlier calls on commodity supercycles had already earned a reputation for prescience.
Currie’s answer was unambiguous: this is not noise, nor a meme-driven anomaly. It is the early phase of a structural repricing driven by policy, geopolitics, and capital scarcity.
“I love that we’re in the foothills of the Himalayas right now. So we’re not even close to the real mountain peaks yet.”
Atomic Numbers vs. Molecules: What’s Actually Going Up
Currie begins by reframing the entire commodity complex along a surprisingly clean fault line.
“When you look at the commodity complex, you take anything that has an atomic number to it that’s in the periodic table, it’s going up right now… If it is a molecule and it has a carbon in it… it’s been struggling.”
Metals — elements essential to electrification, defense, and industrial infrastructure — are rising together. Hydrocarbons and agricultural commodities, by contrast, have lagged.
The reason is not simple scarcity. Oil fundamentals, Currie notes, are not dramatically looser than copper. The differentiator is hoarding — intentional stockpiling driven by geopolitical risk and fear of future access constraints.
“What’s going on in the metal space is hoarding, given the concerns over having availability of these critical minerals.”
The Three Ds: Debasement, De-Dollarization, Diversity
Currie expands the familiar inflation narrative into a broader geopolitical framework.
“You threw out the idea of debasement, and I want to throw in three other Ds — de-dollarization and diversity — to your debasement.”
The turning point, he argues, was 2022, when Western governments froze Russian central bank assets.
“Every emerging market goes, uh-oh… I don’t want to be owning any dollar-denominated assets.”
The response has been decisive: central banks rotating away from Western bonds into assets that cannot be frozen — notably gold and other metals.
“There’s still a lot more buying by central banks to diversify themselves out of dollars.”
This is not speculative positioning. It is balance-sheet self-defense.
Why China Matters — Especially for Silver
While gold buying is dominated by central banks, silver’s surge has a distinct driver: Chinese households.
“The reality is this is a squeeze by the population of the people in China.”
Silver occupies a unique dual role — half industrial input, half store of value.
“It goes into the production of solar PV… it’s 50% an industrial metal and then 50% of a store of value like gold.”
As a critical input into China’s solar manufacturing ecosystem — and as an affordable hedge for households — silver has become strategically indispensable.
“Even at $120 an ounce… it still makes it a much more affordable store of value.”
The result is visible in pricing distortions, with Shanghai silver premiums far exceeding global benchmarks.
Superconductors and the Copper Constraint
Currie draws a deeper connection across metals through electrification.
“What do gold, silver, and copper all have in common? They’re superconductors.”
Even copper — imperfect as a superconductor — sits at the heart of the energy transition. The physical constraint is no longer generation, but transmission.
“One of the restrictions on their big capex budgets is the availability of transformers. What are transformers? Big chunks of copper.”
This is where the commodity story collides with Big Tech.
Asset-Light Meets Asset-Heavy
Perhaps the most consequential insight in the conversation is Currie’s description of a regime collision.
“The asset-light space is getting into the asset-heavy space… these hyperscalers are putting steel into the ground.”
In past cycles, capital rotated from asset-light sectors to asset-heavy ones. This time, the same firms dominate both sides.
“You’re no longer an asset-light, infinitely scalable software company. You’re a miner. You’re an oil company.”
The implication is profound: valuation multiples must compress, cost structures must rise, and physical inputs must be secured — at almost any price.
“This repricing is going to be more violent, more sustainable.”
Why High Prices Don’t Mean Supernormal Returns
A recurring skepticism is whether $14,000 copper or triple-digit silver imply speculative excess. Currie pushes back.
“$14,000 a ton copper doesn’t mean these guys are earning supernatural returns.”
As capital floods in, costs rise alongside prices — stabilizing internal rates of return.
“It’s not about the supply and demand of the molecules… it’s about the supply and demand of the capital used to create the production.”
The constraint isn’t geology. It’s willingness to invest.
Policy, Not Markets, Create Supercycles
Currie is explicit: every major commodity supercycle has been policy-driven.
- The 1970s: war spending and the oil embargo
- The 2000s: China’s WTO accession
- Today: deglobalization, electrification, and redistribution
“If you liked any of these three stories back in 2020, you got to love them today.”
Even the energy transition, he argues, was never primarily about climate.
“They did it for energy security.”
Volatility Is the Feature, Not the Bug
Unlike linear bull markets, commodity supercycles unfold through violent price spikes.
“They weren’t a steady upward trend… they were sequences of price spikes.”
This time, Currie expects even greater instability.
“It’s a bubbling cauldron of supply and demand imbalances.”
Volatility deters capital. Underinvestment reinforces scarcity. The feedback loop intensifies.
What Could Break the Thesis?
The main risk is not supply, but demand shocks — particularly from China.
“The risk is the demand for housing in China collapses.”
But that adjustment, Currie argues, already occurred in 2023–2024.
“You’ve already paid the price on that one.”
The physical imbalance remains.
“Bottom line, you need this investment.”
The Takeaway for Investors
The metals rally is not a curiosity. It is a signal — of fractured trade, strategic hoarding, capital misallocation, and an overdue repricing of the physical world.
As Wiesenthal observes in closing, the war on free trade forces duplication, stockpiling, and redundancy — all of which are commodity-intensive by design.
Currie’s message is stark but consistent: the supercycle is not about optimism. It is about inevitability.
And by his own measure, we’re still climbing out of the foothills.
Footnote:
1 Weisenthal, Joe and Tracy Alloway. "Jeff Currie on the Crazy Surge in Metals, And Why The Supercycle Has Years to Run." Bloomberg, 30 Jan. 2026.
