Investors love heavy metal

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Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Thursday, January 29th, and this is your FT News briefing. Tesla released a historic earnings report yesterday. Not in a good way though. And Donald Trump says the clock is ticking for a on. it's not just precious metals that are benefiting from geopolitical uncertainty. The companies that mine them are getting a boost too. People are feeling

this sense of uncertainty. And so people are looking for places to put their money. Places that they think are gonna be safe. I'm Mark Filipino and here's the news you need to start your day.

Tesla's annual revenue declined last year. That was the first time that had ever happened. Overall revenues for 2025 came in 3% lower than in 2024. Sales were weighed down by President Donald Trump's policies, he canceled a bunch of electric vehicle incentive plans. Plus, there was consumer backlash in the US and Europe to CEO Elon Musk's political activism and support for far-right parties.

Yesterday, Tesla said it will scrap its S and X models and invest two billion dollars into Musk's XAI company. It signals Tesla's shift from cars to artificial intelligence and robotics. Last year, the company lost its position as the world's biggest electric vehicle maker to China's BYD.

U.S. President Donald Trump is warning Iran that it's quote, time is running out to reach a deal in order to avoid American military action. Trump has repeatedly threatened to strike the Islamic Republic over its recent crackdown on anti-regime protests. And the president said a fleet of ships is ready to complete a mission similar to the extraction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

Here to tell us more is the FT Steph Chavez. She covers US defense. Hi, Steph. Hi, Mark. So tell us some more about Trump's threats and how they've evolved over time. So the recent threats, as you said, began amid Iran's brutal crackdown on protesters earlier this month. He came out

saying the US was locked and loaded and that help is on the way for the protesters. You know, he was seriously weighing intervening militarily, but ultimately he backed off. But he still deployed more US military assets to the region, including an aircraft carrier strike group. Carrying dozens of planes and helicopters, additional FAD and Patriot Air Defense System, as well as a dozen F-15 strike Eagle jets.

And with regard to the ships, he's calling them his beautiful armada. And at first he said he was sending the armada to the Middle East just in case. But his rhetoric has gotten more aggressive, especially since yesterday when he said time is running out for the regime to reach a deal. He is also threatening that any US action could be far worse than the strikes that he ordered against Iran's three key nuclear facilities last June.

Now, assuming that the US doesn't take military action, what kind of deal is Trump trying to make here? So yesterday morning he said that a deal hinges on Iran's nuclear program, saying the regime cannot have nuclear weapons. But beyond that, Trump and his administration have not given specifics.

One senior administration official told reporters on Wednesday that with regard to Iran, we are open for business if the regime wants to reach out, and that the regime knows what the terms of any deal are. It's also worth pointing out that even though Trump seems to be tying this deal to Iran's nuclear enrichment program, he's been claiming since the summer that the US obliterated Iran's enrichment program with those strikes that he ordered last year.

Now Steph, how has Iran responded to all this? Iran has said that it's ready to defend itself, but also that it's ready for dialogue. Iranian officials have come out saying that they're not seeking war, but that they're prepared for one. Iran's president also started implementing emergency measures to shore up supplies of essential goods and to keep the Iranian government running should the US attack.

It's worth noting that Iran has said that its nuclear program was not for building weapons but for civilian use, and now it's denying that it has restarted its nuclear program since the US strikes last year. Okay, so we're talking you some big hypotheticals here, but what kind of consequences would a large US military action in Iran have?

The most immediate risk would be one of retaliation against US forces in the region. There are somewhere between thirty and forty thousand US troops spread across multiple countries and at sea. And of course, there's the risk that any conflict could spill over to other parts of the region. It could also affect oil supplies. Iran's elite revolutionary guards have warned countries in the region that if the US strikes, oil supplies that pass through the Strait of Hormuz could be at risk.

And if the US does attack, Iran could target oil and gas facilities across the region, acting on this notion that if they can't sell oil, nobody can. So Steph, what does this all tell us about Trump's foreign policy decisions? Of course, there have been many over the past month.

So it tells me that force very much has a place in Trump's foreign policy. But since he's making the comparison to Venezuela himself, um, it's important to stress that Iran and Venezuela are very different geopolitical situations. In Venezuela, there's a clear regime structure and one that was preserved with the US military action, right? They cut off the head of the snake, but the actual structure is the same. And the new president was a regime official.

In Iran, the regime is not one with centralized power at the top. It's got rival factions and networks that compete with each other for power. And the Supreme Leader kind of maneuvers and moderates and balances these different power centers. So if you remove the Supreme Leader, it's not necessarily going to change that. That's the FT Steph Chavez in Washington. Thanks, Steph. Thanks, Mark.

The Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged yesterday, that was expected. Only two members of the U.S. Central Bank voted in favor of a quarter point cut. But Chair J Powell still had to field a bunch of questions ranging from the economic to the political. So let's start with the political.

Powell did not comment on the Department of Justice investigation into him, but he did explain why he attended the Supreme Court oral arguments about whether the president can fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook. I would say that that case is perhaps the most important legal case in the Fed's hundred and thirteen year history. And I I as I thought about it I thought uh it would might be hard to explain why I didn't attend.

Powell caught flack from U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent for going to the hearing. Powell did mention that past Fed chairs have attended Supreme Court cases in the past. Now on to the economic side of the press conference. Inflation is still sitting higher than the Fed's two percent target rate, but Powell said that price pressures are acting about as expected.

And he said that there's a clear improvement in the outlook for growth. And that's good news because there are signs the American job market is beginning to slow. Essentially the economy has once again surprised us with its strength, not for the first time.

Precious metals like gold and silver are hitting record high prices. And because of that, mining companies are getting a lot of love from investors too. Camilla Hodson covers commodities for the FT and she joins me now to chat about this. Hi, Camilla. Good morning. So just put this rally into context for me. How big is it? It's a really extraordinary rally that's happened in really not very much time at all. What we've seen is over the past month, the 50 biggest mining stocks.

So miners like BHP, Rio Tinto, Anglo American that are listed around the world have added almost five hundred billion dollars to their market capitalizations, and that's a rise of about twenty percent over the last month. The bigger picture is that the mining sector overall is not massive.

when it comes to sectors like technology and AI, and so lots of money going into mining has a kind of outsized impact because something somewhat small is getting quite a lot bigger. But still it is an extraordinary change in not much time. And so Camilla, why are these metals and mining companies a new target for investors?

It's part of this really interesting moment that we're in, I think, where there are conflicts around the world, there are geopolitical tensions, people are feeling this sense of uncertainty. And so people are looking for places to put their money, places that they think are gonna be safe. And this is all coming in the context too of people losing confidence a bit in the US dollar, which has historically been something seen as

safe and a good bet. And so gold, for example, is often what people buy when they don't know where else to put their money. Um but gold is very expensive now. And that's causing people to look elsewhere, but still within that same sector. So silver, for example, has really rallied in price in recent weeks.

We've also seen record highs for copper. And I think the mining stocks are also benefiting from this because these are the companies that make things like gold, silver, copper, and so they stand to benefit from rising prices. So these rising prices are pushing up the valuations of these mining companies. How do analysts that you've spoken to feel about that?

I think for a long time analysts have felt that the mining sector has been kind of unloved and perhaps also that the valuations of mining companies hasn't really kept pace with the actual underlying price of the asset or the value of the metals that they produce. It seems like maybe there's a sense that that's changing and those two things are starting to come together. So for example, the share price of a gold miner is perhaps more reflective of the value of gold.

But equally I think people are cautious. There's a sense that, you know, you need to be careful not to just jump on a hype train and put your money into a junior miner that perhaps isn't ever gonna actually build a mine. So given all this geopolitical uncertainty that you've been talking about, does it seem like this rally still has room to run?

I think investors and analysts are fairly optimistic, particularly when it comes to the mining majors, the big established companies that do produce lots of metal and have big revenues and are looking around at the moment. for deals and ways to grow the business. There's also a sense that many metals prices are likely to keep rising because in the medium term we're likely to see shortages of things like copper and lithium and potentially a whole suite of other metals.

So in that sense analysts do think there's further to run. But of course with markets you never really know. It's difficult to forecast and also as more generalist money and kind of retail investor money as opposed to specialist money goes into the sector, there's always a risk that those investors get

spooked or take their money out once they think that they've made enough and that brings prices down. Camilla Hodson covers commodities for the FT. Camilla, thanks so much for your time. Thanks so much. You can read more on all these stories for free when you click the links in our show notes. This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Check back tomorrow for the latest business news.

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