At the 2025 Global Alts New York Conference, Aline Carnizelo, Managing Partner at Frontier Commodities Strategy; Stephen Klein, Co-Founder at AFBI; Jackie Rosner, Managing Director at PAAMCO Prisma; and Mike Severo, Head of Commodities at LMR Partners, spoke on the Hard Assets in a New Paradigm: Navigating the Shift to Commodities, Gold & Alternative Stores of Value panel. The speakers examined how deglobalization, policy shifts, and central bank demand are fueling a new cycle in commodities and gold, and discussed where investors are finding returns across hard assets in an uncertain macro environment.
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2025 Global Alts New York – Aline Carnizelo, Stephen Klein, Jackie Rosner, and Mike Severo on the Hard Assets in a New Paradigm
General Market Outlook and Hard Assets
Aline Carnizelo describes the current global environment as a “different paradigm” than 2020. She highlights that the world is no longer characterized by flat interest rates close to zero and inflation close to zero. Instead, it’s a deglobalized world where inflation is “higher for longer,” and supply chains are bifurcating. She also adds the megatrend of dollarization from Western markets.
Hard assets are significantly benefiting from megatrends including higher inflation, rising interest rates, deglobalization, the bifurcation of supply chains, decarbonization, green investing, and geopolitical risks and tensions.
Commodities are at the “heart of what is happening in the world,” driven by the need to secure supply chains, either directly or indirectly through material hoarding. She gives an example of copper coming to the US in anticipation of a tariff that isn’t even in place yet, tightening Chinese and European markets.
The global shift is moving production away from the most cost-efficient locations to politically driven ones. For example, aluminum production, which is 80% energy cost, is most efficient next to a hydro plant in China. However, with 50% tariffs to incentivize US production, finding a long-term electricity contract for a new US smelter has been challenging for two months, highlighting the much higher production costs.
This shift means that while there will likely be a lower overall global GDP due to decreased productivity, it creates diversified sources of uncorrelated returns for investors from an allocation point of view.
She foresees a future with a “much more commodity intensive unit of that GDP”.
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