Mining for More
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What insights do Alan and James share about the mining summit in Perth?
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Hello, I'm Alan Kohler, editor-at-large of Intelligence Investor and finance presenter and columnist and podcaster for the ABC.
And I'm James Thompson, senior Chanticleer columnist at the Australian Financial Review.
And we are The Money Cafe. And James, you're in Perth. Why are you there?
I'm in Perth, yes. We have our mining summit here today on Wednesday and... It's always a great event. Great to get over to Perth. We went up to the Pilbara on Monday and had a look at one of Rio Tinto's mines called Western Ranges. And I hadn't been up there before, so it was quite an experience. You sort of write about the Pilbara and mining for 25 years, but to finally get there and have a look and see.
see just the scale of just one mine was it was quite eye-opening i flew over the pilbara um once i don't think in 1975 with lang hancock driving the plane was a small plane and he was like hancock was driving and uh he was showing me his you know whatever he had up there and We were up high at one point and he says, have a look at this, and he dives down and did a massive dive.
I thought I was going to die. Anyway. We had no such acrobatics. I mean, even… Even that is a really good point, Alan. You're flying full Qantas jets up to these tiny towns, such is the sort of infrastructure and the logistics of the FIFO system, and it's amazing. Yeah. So, yeah, very interesting.
Very good. Okay, so Iran, what do we think – They haven't got a deal yet. Trump's been talking it up for a few days, and then he starts blowing up their ships in the Strait of Hormuz, and that's going to – I mean, Iran's got upset about that, so that's going to hold up a deal between the two, isn't it?
Yeah, you'd think so. I mean, the issue here, I think, is that Donald Trump sort of created a bit of a monster – In a way, obviously, the Iranian regime was monstrous before, but now they're monstrous and switched on to the leverage that they've got over the world. What everybody says is that no geopolitical expert ever thought that the Strait of Hormuz would ever be shut. And yet here we are, the Strait of Hormuz is shut and it's been shut for the best part of 10 weeks. The Iranians have got a pretty strong hand. They've got no great incentive to open the Strait quickly without securing a good deal for themselves. And Trump seems to have this view that he holds all the cards and there's no great
There doesn't seem to be any great hurry in his mind. So it's very strange. I mean, the market keeps telling us that the logical conclusion here is a deal and a deal pretty quickly because the market's looking at, you know, the gasoline price, which is now creeping – it's well over $4 and, you know, starting to creep towards $5 in some – for diesel and in some places. And they're also looking at Trump's approval ratings – which, you know, they're not in the toilet, they're in the S-bend. And you would think that Trump's really, you know, he's famously attuned to what voters want. This time he just seems to be brazing it out. So as the midterm elections in November get closer, you just wonder what the strategy is here.
You know, I don't know if you saw, Alan, the consumer confidence figures in America last Stock market's at all-time highs, and consumer confidence hasn't been this low since 1947.
Yeah, that's right. So, I mean, it's a really amazing situation and Trump does seem to be in a real pickle because Iran, he's managed to change the regime in Iran, as promised, but instead of the Ayatollah Khamenei, who was relatively moderate, he's got this revolutionary guard in charge and they're not moderate at all. Yeah. And they, as you say... Understand the leverage I've got over the Strait of Hormuz, which in some ways, I mean, what they were trying to get was leverage through having a nuclear weapon because, you know, everyone who's got a bomb, you know, other countries are very careful about, which is why they want it.
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