Precious Metals Rally Accelerates as Gold and Copper Hit Record Highs

Remy: The rally in precious metals is fast and furious and showing no signs of slowing down. Gold is not just hitting new record highs yesterday, gold futures also posted their largest one day price jump ever. Now silver and copper also hitting new all time highs. While zinc is at its highest price since February of 2023. Geopolitical tensions are pushing gold higher, as central banks do keep buying the metal and pull back from bonds.

Joining me to weigh in this morning is Peter Hjorth, CEO of Bluelake Mineral. Peter, great to have you on. Thank you so much for joining me. Well, of course, we continue to keep an eye on those gold prices. tell us what's behind the record run that we're seeing in metals.

Peter: Hi, Remy. Thanks for inviting me to the show. Great to be with you. It's exciting times in the mining sector. Virtually every day, there's a new all time high price record recorded for metals like copper, gold, and silver. Copper is up last 12 months, 50%. Gold is up 100%. Silver is up 300%. So and obviously this has triggered rally in stocks of mining companies and junior research companies. So it's pretty exciting situation, uh, behind all of this. I mean, there's some who say it's a perfect storm. All the various factors affecting prices of commodities are working jointly to for this upward movement. You have, uh, basics like supply and demand factors. You have economics, like remaining inflation, weakening dollar. You have geopolitical aspects like tariffs, threat of trade wars, etc.. And then on top of everything, you have the psychological aspect that investors are selling off dollars on U.S. securities, investing gold as a safe haven.

Remy: As you mentioned, there are so many moving parts here when it comes to the fundamentals as well as technicals behind the price action for the precious metals and also the metals complex overall. You mentioned juniors. And of course over recent years there has been a lot of M&A action. But what impact do these prices have on the industry itself?

Peter: I mean, our business is capital intensive. There's a lot of money to sort of mining operations, you know, to be. Yeah, that's actually one of the key critical factors for success to be able to organize financing in a good way. So, good commodity prices helps us, of course, in raising more money. Uh, in our case, we will have to raise at least a couple of hundred million U.S. dollars to just sort the mining operations on a good price. the commodities that we work with is fundamental, of course.

Remy: And of course, we're keeping a close eye on geopolitical headlines, it's hard to believe it's only been about a month since the new year kicked off. But how have U.S. actions on tariffs pushed the critical minerals demand, and how has this shaped the global industry?

Peter: Are you ever seeing more interest from North American investors? There's both the Canadians, which are the huge mining sector, of course, and North Americans in the U.S. that are interested in good mining products in Europe or of interest. We have good geology, a lot of interesting projects. And we have also good jurisdiction. If you look on a global scale comparing with other jurisdictions, it's relatively safe. You know, you have the proprietary rights and everything is in place. So I've seen a lot of increased interest from North American investors in the, on the European scene, especially in the Nordic countries where we based our activities.

Remy: And while I have you here, I do want to ask you about the role of AI, in particular hyperscalers. We know that copper is no longer just an industrial metal for pipes. Some may say it's a backbone for AI data centers and global defense projects. But with these new demand drivers crunching the supply chain, are we moving into supercycle, where copper is officially a strategic national security asset?

Peter: Among the metals we're working with, we are mostly optimistic about copper and gold, and silver is probably at the peak or very close to the peak, and we don't know the future there. But for copper, it's not a different story. All the fundamentals are indicating that copper will keep on going. You have
your drivers, as you said yourself, you have the artificial intelligence demand, which is huge. You have the energy transition with the electrification of industry, transportation, society as a whole. Those are huge demand drivers. And the general forecast or consensus forecast is that the demand for copper will increase 50% up to 2040. And also on the other side, the consensus is that the supply side won't be able to keep up because we have, you know, major mines, copper mines that will, uh, virtually, you know, reaching end of life, reducing their output, even closing down new mines will not be able to substitute that. So copper has a great future. And copper is definitely probably the most important commodity going forward is substituting oil as the most critical commodity on both on economical levels, but also from a geopolitical sense. So, copper has a great future. And we'll see what happens with the price, but our forecast is that we'll keep on going.

Remy: And very quickly we have about 60s left. So tell us what's going on with tokenization and precious metals.

Peter: Okay. Tokenization is really interesting. We're very open minded about finding new solutions to financing. Tokenization is an interesting proposition, and maybe it could work. We think it would be probably in the first round. More adaptable to large scale, large-cap companies. We're really looking for 24/7 trading. And maybe fractional trading eventually will trickle down to mid-size and small-cap and micro-cap companies also. So we're definitely going to look into we'll see what happens.

Remy: Well Peter we will have to leave it there. But thank you so much for joining us today. And thank you so much for sharing all of your insights.

Peter: Thank you Remy. Good to have you.