Billions, bloodlines and iron ore – the mining feud that won’t die
News in brief
US President Donald Trump yesterday said the war in Iran was close to over, telling a journalist from ABC News US that we are about to see an “amazing two days ahead”. It comes as the US military continues to execute the blockade of Iranian ports. Yesterday there were reports that a US destroyer intercepted two oil tankers attempting to leave Iran.
Virgin Australia will cut some domestic flights in coming months because of the spike in oil prices but said it is still on track to hit higher earnings in the current half year thanks to its hedging policies. That helped send its share price up eight per cent yesterday.
The Reserve Bank has started using social media platforms to explain economic concepts like inflation, rolling out campaigns on Instagram, Facebook and Threads.
Ride sharing group Uber has committed more than $US10bn to buying thousands of autonomous vehicles and taking stakes in their developers, dropping its asset-light “gig economy” business model as robotaxis disrupt the disrupter.
A man in the UK has won an original Pablo Picasso painting worth close to $2 million in a charity raffle, after buying a ticket for about $190.
Fear-o-meter
In Australian corporate history, there has never been a fight quite the one between the Hancocks and the Wrights. For fans of the 1980s TV show Dallas, it is like JR Ewing taking on Cliff Barnes, but longer and for more money.
The case centred on thousands of pages of documents dating back decades. The full proceedings have outlasted the original judge who reached the compulsory retirement age before the matter could make it to trial.
The final decision in the WA Supreme Court ran for 1600 pages. In the end, the decision rested on the Court finding that legacy deeds signed decades ago by Lang Hancock, Gina Rinehart’s father, were still in force.
It has been an amazing story for a long time. Rival dynasties and internal family conflict running in parallel. It is a very public reminder that the Hancock empire is still dealing with legacy issues, trusts, and competing versions of history.
Fear & Greed Q+A today
On whether the tech stocks have been oversold, and what to make of the Magnificent 7 tech giants:
“Nvidia was such a market darling — it was the marquee trade for AI for a very long time. It’s held up okay, but there’s been a shift in where hyperscaler capital expenditure is going.
Nvidia was really the only game in town for a long time, and they’re still leaps and bounds ahead in terms of training AI models. But now the narrative is that there are alternative options. The hyperscalers — Amazon and Google — are looking at custom silicon rather than just relying on Nvidia’s general-purpose chips.
Even if those alternatives aren’t as high performance, they’re more cost effective, and that gives the hyperscalers more control and better economics. It also creates competitive tension, because Nvidia’s margins have been so high and they’ve taken a large share of the profit pool.”
The decades-long legal battle between the descendants of legendary miners Lang Hancock and Peter Wright, who opened the Pilbara to large scale iron ore mining, has ended … for now … and Australia’s richest person, and daughter of Hancock, Gina Rinehart, will have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties to her opponents. Justice Jennifer Smith, in the Supreme Court of Western Australian, handed down her judgement more than 13 years after Wright Prospecting first launched its claim again Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting. As Justice Smith put it, each side had a win and a loss. She dismissed Wright’s claim for a half share of Hancock’s East Angelas iron ore deposit, valued at more than $1 billion. But she found that Wright, and fellow claimant, DFD Rhodes, the family office of another WA mining magnate, had succeeded in making a claim for a share of past and future royalties from Hope Downs iron ore deposits. Hope Downs is mined by a joint venture of Hancock Prospecting and Rio Tinto. Rio will have to cough up some of the royalties, interest and costs, along with Rinehart.
Greed-o-meter
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