Geoffrey Fouvry

1/13 🧵 Rubbish theory about strong demand & inflation. Let's kill that w/ hard data. Some commentators @RaoulGMI argue that most have it wrong about inflation b/c in the 70s, you had a lot of demand lots of ppl entering the workforce. Well.... Price fell post civil war...

It is happening. 🔥🔥🔥 The London Metal Exchange (LME), owned by Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX) since 2012, is exploring the tokenization of off-warrant metal inventories stored in its Hong Kong warehouses. The aim is to turn this metal into digital assets that can be used for financing: primarily as collateral for loans. Key points: ⭕️ Off-warrant metal (inventory without LME warehouse warrants/title documents) currently lacks a standardized financing mechanism. On-warrant metal can already be traded or pledged easily. ⭕️ Tokenization would create trackable digital claims on the physical metal, making it more bankable as collateral and potentially increasing liquidity. ⭕️ The LME says it is at the early stages of exploring this for business financing and will consult stakeholders. An invitation-only industry roundtable is planned for early November 2026. 🔶Policy context: The move is tied to Hong Kong’s first five-year economic blueprint (published September 2026), which seeks to position the city as a commodities trading and financing hub by attracting investors, traders, and financiers. This aligns with China’s 15th Five-Year Plan (March 2026), which for the first time explicitly backs developing Hong Kong into a commodity trading powerhouse. Hong Kong plans to leverage its status as an approved LME delivery point (approved January 2025). 🎯Expected benefits include drawing more capital and activity into Hong Kong’s commodities ecosystem and giving the LME a new revenue stream. Separately, HKEX is testing tokenized carbon credits for near-instant settlement. 🎯This fits into the broader push for physical metal liquidity and trading infrastructure in Hong Kong (as referenced in the surrounding X discussion about MKS PAMP considering a vault there).

Renault reports strong Q3 revenue despite pressure from Chinese rivals, boosted by EV demand autonews.com/renault/ane-ren…

🇺🇦 🇺🇲 The confrontation inside Trump's Ukraine peace negotiations is now coming into focus. Le Monde reports that Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner spent nearly three hours pitching Ukraine's presidential chief of staff, Kyrylo Budanov, a postwar economic arrangement built around restoring Russian oil and gas flows to Europe through Ukrainian pipelines. The meeting took place on October 9 at the Shell Bay golf club in Florida. Witkoff presented the proposal as a regional prosperity plan: Ukraine would collect transit revenues, Europe would receive cheaper energy, and Russia would regain access to commercial routes disrupted by the war. Budanov saw something fundamentally different. According to a witness cited by Le Monde, he objected that the arrangement would recreate Ukraine's dependence on Moscow. “Our model is not Belarus, but Poland!” he reportedly replied. The meeting was interrupted, and Budanov called Zelensky. When talks resumed, news arrived that Trump had announced a separate agreement with Putin involving Russian diesel. Le Monde reports that an irritated Witkoff then demanded that the Ukrainians accept the arrangement and stop striking Russian oil refineries, arguing that the attacks endangered the wider world. A source familiar with the Ukrainian delegation described its members as exceptionally distressed by the encounter. The account adds a revealing dimension to the commercial negotiations we have been tracking. The proposed Lukoil asset sale, Novatek's involvement in an Alaska LNG venture, the broader US-Russia list of business opportunities reported by the Financial Times, and now the proposed restoration of Russian energy transit through Ukraine all point to the prominence of energy deals in Washington's diplomatic approach. These are separate proposals, with different participants and legal circumstances. But Le Monde's reporting exposes the strategic disagreement underlying them. For Witkoff, restoring commercial flows appears to be part of the mechanism for producing a peace settlement. For Budanov, according to the account, those same flows threaten to restore Moscow's economic leverage over Ukraine. The reported exchange also raises a question about sequencing: why was Kyiv being pressed to stop attacking Russian refineries while Russia continued striking Ukrainian energy infrastructure? Le Monde's reconstruction relies on accounts of a private meeting. The reported exchanges have not been independently confirmed by the participants. Source: Le Monde

Jamie Dimon to a country that pulled its gold out of New York: you have three armies within 400 miles, while gold in America is protected by two oceans and the US military “If we have the strongest military in the world and the strongest economy in the world, we will be the preeminent reserve currency. It is those two things.” “I was in a country somewhere in the Middle East, and also in Europe, and the people said, we took our gold out of the vaults in New York City and moved it to our country. You know what I said to him? I said, you have three armies within 400 miles who can come take your gold.” “That’s the real world. You’re not thinking clearly about safety. That gold is protected by the Atlantic, the Pacific, the United States military, the rule of law.” “But if we are not the preeminent military and economy, you will see our reserve status come down.”