Finance

I remember sitting in a diner in Scranton, Pennsylvania, about three years ago, listening to a retired geologist talk about “dirt that thinks.” He wasn’t being poetic; he was talking about the neodymium and dysprosium sitting in the hills of the American West. At the time, the market for rare earth stocks felt like a … Read more

It is funny how we spent the last few years obsessed with the hum of electric motors and the promise of a lithium-ion future, only to find ourselves staring at a fuel tank that still needs filling. I was sitting in a small diner just outside of Chicago last month, watching the midwestern rain wash … Read more

I remember walking past a construction site in Miami last summer where the humidity felt like a physical weight against my chest. There was a billboard for a luxury resort slated to open this year, all glass and infinity pools. Usually, these signs are just monuments to things I cannot afford. They represent a world … Read more

Walking through the Chicago Board of Trade these days feels different than it did even eighteen months ago. There is a specific kind of quiet tension that settles over the floor when a market stops behaving like a financial instrument and starts behaving like a physical necessity. We have spent decades treating silver as gold’s … Read more

I spent most of last Tuesday staring at a digital dashboard that represents, of all things, a broken contract in a suburb outside of Chicago. It is a strange feeling to realize that your personal cash flow for the quarter might depend entirely on how a specific judge in Illinois feels about a construction dispute. … Read more