MW Former Goldman commodities guru sees another decade of rising prices for metals and critical minerals
By Barbara Kollmeyer
But it's going to be 'bubbly' warns Jeffrey Currie
Investor hoarding and a global capex boom would support prices for gold, silver and base metals, says a former to Goldman strategist.
A former top commodities strategist at Goldman Sachs says investors should get ready for another 10 years of rising prices for metals and critical minerals.
Jeffrey Currie, chief strategy officer of Energy Pathways at Carlyle, told Bloomberg in an interview published Friday that hoarding and a global capex boom would support those commodities prices.
His comments come as gold (GC00), silver (SI00) and other base metals (PA00) (PL00) pulled back on Friday, after a surge to start the year and rallies in 2025.
Currie explained that primary critical minerals - "anything that has an atomic number to it, that's in the periodic table, is going up right now," while "anything that's a molecule and has a carbon - corn, wheat, etc. -have been stuck.
"So what's going on in the metals space is hoarding, given the concerns over having availability of these critical minerals," he said, also flagging the "three Ds" driving demand. Those are debasement, as investors swap fiat currencies like the dollar for assets such as gold, de-dollarization DXY and diversity, he said.
Related: Stocks are signaling that another commodities 'supercycle' is afoot in 2026
One leg of the process came after the U.S. and Europe froze Russia's central bank assets after its Ukraine invasion and emerging markets countries started to worry about owning dollar-denominated assets, Currie said. "And as a result, they're moving as fast as they can out of dollar assets into assets that cannot be seized, and precious metals and metals are part of that."
Geopolitical risk seen this year, such as the U.S. incursion into Venezuela has added to that desire for those countries to hold those commodities, he said.
Among Currie's prescient past calls, he correctly foresaw oil prices rising to above $90 a barrel in 2007, while his contrarian call on gold in 2013 helped the bank's clients sidestep the biggest drop in those prices in 33 years.
A risk to his bullish thesis is the imbalance in copper (HG00), industrial metals and critical minerals markets, and demand might come down if supply is lacking, he said. For example, copper underperformed in 2023 and 2024 because high interest rates were causing a severe housing crisis in China, which hurt the sector and the commodity, he said.
Back in 2024, Currie said people also told him they didn't want to invest in the minerals and metals space because returns were too good from tech to ignore.
He said volatility also was keeping some investors out of the metals and mining space, and returns in the asset-light tech space will have to get to a point where they say it's worth the risk to invest in the old economy. "And when they do that, that's when you're going to see the rotation."
How high could copper go, for instance? If a company like Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) has to go chasing that space "you can go really high because you're talking about moving trillions of dollars out of asset light into asset heavy when nothing's been here for over a decade."
Nvidia shares were up almost 55% from a year ago Friday, while silver prices were about 200% higher and gold prices were up about 78%, according to FactSet.
-Barbara Kollmeyer
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 30, 2026 11:33 ET (16:33 GMT)
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