“If I could only open one thing each morning it would be John Ellis’s News Items newsletter.” — Larry Summers, President Emeritus of Harvard University and former Secretary of the Treasury of the United States.
1. Gold surged to an all-time high yesterday, fueled by geopolitical tensions and central bank interest rate cuts. Bullion’s price climbed to $2,740.37 a troy ounce on Monday, representing a 40 per cent gain in the past year. The war in the Middle East, coupled with uncertainty over the outcome of next month’s US presidential election, have supercharged gold’s allure as a haven asset. “The outlook for gold is quite bullish,” said Joni Teves, UBS precious metals strategist, who has a $3,000-a-troy-ounce price target next year. “We think that investor holdings of gold have a lot of room to grow over the next year or so, and that should drive prices higher.” (Source: ft.com)
2. Researchers at the United States Geological Survey and the Arkansas government announced on Monday that they had found a trove of lithium, a critical raw material for electric vehicle batteries, in an underground brine reservoir in Arkansas. With the help of water testing and machine learning, the researchers determined that there might be five million to 19 million tons of lithium — more than enough to meet all of the world’s demand for the metal — in a geological area known as the Smackover Formation. Several companies, including Exxon Mobil, are developing projects in Arkansas to produce lithium, which is dissolved in underground brine. Whether lithium harvesting takes hold in the region will depend on the ability of those companies to scale up new methods of extracting the valuable battery ingredient from salty water. (Source: nytimes.com)
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