Videos & Podcasts Of The Week

A Look At Ukraine & Israel, Oil & Commodities Markets, And Perspective on 2024

It has been a busy week to start the year, but I wanted to write about a video and a couple podcasts that caught my attention this week. The first video is a great look at the geopolitical situation, and it might poke holes in some of the media narratives that have been prevalent over the last couple years, especially surrounding Ukraine. The first podcast is a great breakdown of commodities, with a particular focus on oil, the king of the commodities. They also discuss uranium, copper, and several other commodities. The second podcast is a short one in the importance of perspective as we head into 2024.

Bitcoin Matrix w/ Lee Slusher

Despite the title of the podcast, this video is not about Bitcoin. They focus on what is going in Ukraine and the Middle East. They also discuss the poor mainstream media coverage of both situations, and where Lee sees things going from here. He breaks down his view of what is going on in Ukraine, where he has a bleak view of how things are going, and how NATO might respond. Overall, it’s a great look at how things are developing in different important conflicts around the world.

Value Hive w/ Chris Martenson

This was an interesting podcast that hit on a wide variety of commodity related topics. I agree with most of what they talked about, but I will outline some of the main points they discuss. We aren’t running out of commodities and resources, but we have already picked the low-hanging fruit. Most, if not all, of the easy to exploit resources have already been picked over, and what we have left is tougher to get to and more expensive. This is why I think a contrarian mindset looking at commodities moving forward is going to prove to be very profitable for investors. Martenson said, and I’ll paraphrase, that you make the most money by knowing something that most investors have wrong, and make investments accordingly. They discuss oil, uranium, copper, and commodities in general.

Commodity markets, in general, have been broken for a long time. Commodity markets, when they originally opened up, this was a place for producers and consumers to come together and square up. I have demand, you have supply, we work it out. Then there was this neat, nifty invention where we developed futures options and forward contracts, which basically said “I don’t have the corn right now, but I will in September” so you do the futures contract on September bushels.

And that was all fair and good, but then something really happened in the last 10-15 years in particular, if that’s the signal in the story, and the noise is speculators… in the case of silver and oil, the signal and the noise have swapped. The noise is the signal now. And so the question becomes “Are they sending us appropriate price signals or not?” And I submit to you the answer is no, because these prices are supposed to be the fully discounted opinion of millions of independent people who are smarter than any one of us.

- Chris Martenson

They talk about why oil is basically the king of commodities, and how it is a political commodity. We saw that when the Biden administration was draining the SPR for a million barrels a day for months to push prices down. They also discuss the futures trading that has been going on with central banks and CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which is a big part of futures markets for commodities). Basically, we have seen price movements that are similar to what is going on silver markets, where it’s not just price discovery. You also have CTA funds exacerbating moves in both directions, which makes oil volatility an issue for investors.

They also discuss how geology is going to be an issue moving forward. Martenson thinks that we have a couple years give or take before shale production in the Permian starts to roll over. When that happens, a lot of people (including investors) are going to wake up and realize, we don’t have as much oil as we thought, and it’s structural. He predicted a decade of scarcity for oil, but I agree with his point that it will be difficult to predict exactly when that will start. There are a lot of geopolitical moving pieces, but I think the lack of supply of oil will become more obvious in the next two or three years. He did point out there is one other shale play that he likes, and that’s the Vaca Muerta down in Argentina. It’s Argentina, which has been where investor capital goes to die, but Milei could potentially change that. It will take time to see how that plays out and how long it takes for Vaca Muerta to start producing a significant amount of oil.

I think somebody has been sitting on the price (of oil) for reasons, and I think it’s going to create a lot of trouble in the future, which is also an opportunity.

I am reasonably convinced that the 7 million barrel supply shortfall in supply versus demand in 2030: that means higher prices…. So who really benefits when the price of oil goes up?

They also discuss how oil impacts the cost of other commodities. Oil prices will flow through to other important commodities like gold, silver, and copper. With copper he points out that we have a huge shortfall of supply. It also takes 10 years to develop a new producing copper mine and copper still trades at the same price as it does in 2007. They move onto discussing uranium, and how green energy is a myth. They are both uranium bulls, but Martenson points out that thorium could be a potential bear thesis on uranium that will take longer to play out. With thorium, we could potentially go for 40-50 years before refueling, with less waste. The other difference is that at the end of the Thorium cycle you don’t get something that goes boom.

Honorable Mention

Auron MacIntyre is one of my favorite political commentators and he is very sharp on current events, culture, and politics. I figured it would be a decent follow up to my post last week, which was pessimistic on 2024 to say the least. He talks about perspective as 2024 gets going, and focusing on what is important. While he thinks the 2024 election cycle is going to be insane like I do, but he points out that starting close to home is a better strategy than getting worked up over national elections. It’s a short podcast at 8 minutes, but I wanted to share it with readers.