Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania. Copper looking sick. How private assets surged & the man who loved plastic bags.
Great links, images and reading from Chartbook newsletter by Adam Tooze
Alexander Apóstol, Regimen : Dramatis Personae, 2017-2018
Copper - the commodity with an econ PhD - is looking pretty sick (and analysts rotate)
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. exited a long-term bullish position on copper and slashed its price forecast for 2025 by almost $5,000, citing shrinking demand in China. The bank has been one of the biggest cheerleaders of the industrial metal, but the increasingly disappointing economic recovery in China will delay an expected rally, analysts including Samantha Dart and Daan Struyven said in an emailed note. They expect prices to average $10,100 next year, compared with a previous target of $15,000 a ton championed by former analysts Jeffrey Currie and Nicholas Snowdon. … Copper surged to fresh highs above $11,000 a ton in May as funds piled in. At the time, Currie — who joined Carlyle Group Inc. last year as chief strategy officer — described the metal as the best trade he’d ever seen. But prices have since slumped by about 18%, with ballooning inventories and a rare surge in exports from China sending alarms about consumption in the world’s top consumer.
Source: BNN Bloomberg
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The growth in private assets. Louis-Vincent Gave with some nightmarish arithmetic.
For subscribers only.
Just great stories and commentary like this.
As Alan Beattie said in the pages of the FT earlier in the year: “Lie Back and think of Pennyslvania”
Source: FT
And data:
Source: Bloomberg
A dramatic threat: VW considers shutting factories in Germany, says works council
Volkswagen is considering shutting factories in Germany and walking back on its pledge to not cut jobs before 2029, as a savings programme launched last year has fallen short by several billions of euros at the company’s flagship brand, according to VW’s works council. Daniela Cavallo, chair of the council that represents VW’s workers, said in a note circulated to employees that the VW brand chief executive Thomas Schäfer had on Monday “admitted” that planned savings had fallen short, pushing the brand into the red. “As a result, the executive board is now questioning German plants, the VW in-house collective wage agreements and the job security programme running until the end of 2029,” said Cavallo. Under German rules, works councils are elected to represent worker interests and sit on the supervisory boards of larger companies, such as VW.
Source: FT
Alexander Apóstol, Sopa de letras II, 1995-1997
Alexander Apóstol was born in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, in 1969. He studied photography with Ricardo Armas from 1987 to 1988, and art history at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas, from 1987 to 1990. … Encompassing photography and video, Apóstol’s oeuvre seeks to expose fractures in the modernist project, both in the artist’s native Venezuela and across South America. Since early in his career, he has concentrated on the iconography of the urban landscape, a tendency exemplified by his series Polished Residents (Residente Pulido, 2001). This set of photographs portrays iconic buildings from 1950s Caracas, but Apóstol digitally altered the images to conceal windows and doors. Built landmarks are thus transformed into impenetrable monoliths that speak to the decadence of a metropolitan project now estranged from its architectural contemporaries. Apóstol’s video Yamaikaleter (2009) features political activists from Venezuela—both supporters and opponents of Hugo Chávez, then president. They take turns reading “Letter from Jamaica,” a document Venezuela’s founder, Simón Bolivar, wrote while in exile in 1815 to request the British Empire’s support for the country’s independence process. The video shows the readers struggling to speak English, a language they do not understand, as a metaphor for the distance between the historical figure and his present-day appropriation. Apóstol again examined questions of history and identity in his series Rehearsing the National Posture (Ensayando la Postura Nacional, 2010),
Source: Guggenheim
Bags, bags, bags … paper, cardboard and plastic … the man who collected the world’s largest collection of plastic bags in an atomic bunker
From the mid 1970s Heinz-Schmidt Bachem began assembling a unique collection of 150,000 of the paper and foil products, mainly bags made of paper and plastic. He housed the collection in an abandoned atomic-bunker in Düren and in 1995 founded the Portable Art Museum.[5] Since his death the fate of the collection remains uncertain.
h.t Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Eine Experten-Revue (2023)
Historic Pigments brought back to life since the 1970s.
For subscribers only.
One example: light greens ground from Malachite
Source: Kremer Pigments h/t Enzensberger
Alexander Apostol, Cabeza de pez, 1992
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