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In this episode of Energy Newsbeat – Conversations in Energy, host Stuart Turley interviews Wasif Latif, president of Sarmaya Partners, to discuss the global impact of President Trump’s tariffs, the return to tangible assets like commodities, and the challenges and opportunities in reindustrializing the U.S. economy. They explore historical parallels to the 1970s, the role of energy, gold, and copper in today’s markets, and why long-term investing in tangible assets is critical amid rising inflation and supply chain shifts. Wasif also shares insights on navigating today’s volatile markets and where future growth lies.
Thank you, Wasif, for your time and leadership in the investment markets. I had an absolute blast. – Stu
Check out Sarmaya Partners’ website here: https://sarmayapartners.com/
Please follow Wasif on his LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wasiflatif/
Highlights of the Podcast
00:00 – Intro
01:18 – Decades of Deindustrialization and Tariff Challenges
02:14 – Historical Lessons from the 1970s Inflation
05:32 – Reindustrialization: America’s Shipbuilding Challenge
06:26 – The Return to Tangibles and Commodities Supercycle
08:35 – Energy, Gold, and Reindustrialization Themes
10:00 – Coal and Global Role and Energy Usage Trends
12:00 – Strengthening the U.S. Balance Sheet with Tangibles
14:29 – Bitcoin and Role in the Financial Mix
16:20 – Stock Market Volatility and Investment Strategies
20:19 – Supply Chain Shifts and Trade War Implications
23:38 – EU Military Retooling and India and Energy Growth
24:59 – Long-Term Oil Demand and Commodity Markets Outlook
26:48 – Market Patience vs. Panic: Investment Mindsets
28:04 – Where to Find Wasif Latif and Samaria ETF Information
28:34 – Closing Remarks and Appreciation
Trump’s Tariffs: Resetting Global Trade and Sparking America’s Industrial Comeback
In this episode of Energy Newsbeat – Conversations in Energy, host Stuart Turley interviews Wasif Latif, president of Sarmaya Partners, to discuss the global impact of President Trump’s tariffs,… pic.twitter.com/puYhq6DZ4T
— STUART TURLEY – Energy Podcast Host (@STUARTTURLEY16) May 2, 2025
Stuart Turley [00:00:07] Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Energy News Beat podcast. My name’s Stu Turley, president of the Sandstone Group. I’ll tell you what, I have never lived through this kind of a news cycle. And with President Trump’s tariffs changing the world right now, I have to rely on experts from around the world. And today I have Wasif Latif. He is the leader over there at Samaria Partners. And I rely on him. We’ve had three Podcasts in the past and I have he’s got some great insight Welcome! How are you today, Wasp?
Wasif Latif [00:00:44] You’re doing great, Stu, how are you?
Stuart Turley [00:00:45] I tell you what, I’m, I am a excited, but I’m a little nervous about what’s going on. And so as we sit back and take a look, the rest of the world, I didn’t realize before this, and I think Greg Gutfeld said it great the other night on the show, he didn’t even know what a tariff was until started. President Trump started talking about them, but now that I’m sitting there watching, even my dad do day trades in seeing what’s going on on all this kind of stuff. We’re seeing a right sizing in the trade deficit is that a fair statement.
Wasif Latif [00:01:18] Yeah, I think that’s, that’s what being attempted and trying to get to. that’s where we’re trying to get to as, as we were talking before we started recording, you know, there’s a, there’s definitely some challenges because, you know, we have decades long embedded sort of deindustrialization that we are trying to right size as you’re saying. And, and so that’s gonna, you know, it won’t be, it won’t come without the challenges is my point. And I think that’s just going to be something that we’re going to continue to work through. You know, tariffs are generally speaking, when you look at history, they are inherently inflationary. So that can pose its own challenge in terms of trying to implement something like this and work through something like. And to me, the really good analogy or an example would be what happened in the 1970s. And if you don’t mind, I can share like a chart that illustrates that. So I was in, I was.
Stuart Turley [00:02:14] Your staff over there at Samaria Partners are fantastic with their charts and I want to give a shout out to you and your staff because after going through and listening to your other podcasts, you guys are rock solid in your viewpoints on investing in commodities and things that stand and can stand up against imbalances in trade. I just want to give you guys a shoutout for your knowledge. That’s why you’re here.
Wasif Latif [00:02:44] Thank you. Thank you, appreciate it. I would go back. So first of all, thanks. Thanks for, you know, our team. My teammate Oliver is fantastic. He’s the one who creates these very, very attractively, visually, and just exciting slides that tell a great story of our beliefs and our views. And it really goes back to history. I’m a student of history. And one thing that human beings don’t learn is that we just don’t from history. And so, you know, the idea is to. Study the nature of markets. And for the most part, markets are very cyclical. And sometimes these are very, very long secular cycles. And if we pay attention to them, we can kind of glean about what may be coming around the corner. You just don’t know what the triggers may be, the exact time of it. But we had a sense that, you know, the valuations, and we showed that slide before in the past, you know commodities versus financial assets, they’re very, cheap. That plus the world just realizing, because of the lockdowns, how important commodities were to our lives and everything that we have built up in the world. And so all that’s coming together to have this great moment. So I can share this slide, which goes back to, as I said, being a student of history, to us, the time that we might be sharing some commonality with is the 1970s in that we have experienced an initial bout of inflation. So the dark green line is CPI or inflation from the 1970’s, basically 1966 all the way to 1984. And then this light green line, is what we have been seeing since 2014. And as you can see that the current inflationary trends. Are pretty closely tracking what we saw in the 70s. Now, we don’t pretend to know exactly what’s gonna happen in the future, but everything that seems to be occurring might line up with this continuing to resemble what we see in the seventies. It might not be exactly the same, but it might rhyme, as Mark Twain has famously said, history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. There might be some rhythm here that might resemble what we saw in the 70s. And in the 70s, we saw a price shock because of the country coming off gold standard and then an additional price shock from the oil embargo. So this time around, the good news is there’s plenty of oil. We got a lot of it. The Saudis are pumping more. So we’re not getting that shock, at least for now. But we are getting what we think is going to be a, you know, an initial price shock with these tariffs because things are I will get more expensive for pretty much folks around the world. And so the initial rate.
Stuart Turley [00:05:31] So the initial great, great point. And that is the re industrialization jobs and manufacturing in the U S and president Trump and his staff meeting yesterday, or his cabinet meeting, excuse me, cabinet meeting. I, I want to impressed on our listeners. There’s two things that come up in this, as we talk about this conversation, was China has built 1700 ships last year. We built five. What do you, what does it take to build a ship? You’ve got to be able to build the engine, the steel, the whole, the people and the people training and the shipbuilders and, and all the jobs that go with it, and if he is going after that one, you don’t fire up a shipbuilding business to go from five to 1,700 ships in about 15 minutes. This is huge.
Wasif Latif [00:06:26] Absolutely. To your point, it takes a decent amount of time, months, sometimes years, to build up those capabilities. We didn’t lose these capabilities overnight. No. And so rebuilding those capabilities will take some time. I truly believe we can redo it. It’s just a matter of the environment, how we go about it, and ultimately how we will be able to pay for it. And if you look back in history, the quickest ramp ups in industrial or military capabilities have been in times of war and those periods were inflationary. And so we as investors keep on coming back to the idea and I’ll share one more slide with you, Stu. And we’ve shown this before is that when you look at our sub themes, what we think is going to really drive the big super cycle that we’re calling the return to is going to be the sub-themes. And, you know, we’ve talked about energy’s life that’s critical, where we’re currently talking about the geopolitical and fiscal risks in the world, where gold is going to be, you know, front and center. And it’s it’s already been reflecting that. But all the way to the right of this is what we developed. And this is going back several years ago when we developed this framework. This isn’t something new for us. We said that we will try to re-onsure and re-industrialize. And that we think that’s definitely in the cards and there’s going to be a wholehearted attempt to do that and and hopefully I’m very hopeful that we we get there and we’re successful but as investors we need to be figuring out okay what does that mean for markets what does it mean for ultimately price action and what that means for us is One of the key things that’s going to be needed for that is going to be copper. It’s going be for our portfolios and then a broad swath of commodities. So to us, that’s great. If you’re a commodity investor, we think the timing is right and it’s right for this type of a resurgence, if you will. The challenge that you mentioned is going be, how do we bring up the labor force and the capabilities there?
Stuart Turley [00:08:36] Oh, you bet this for our podcast listeners that watch this on video. It makes sense because wassup has a great looking slide here in the top bar. It’s the return to tangibles commodity super cycle. The next line down is tactical sub themes. Energy is life. Then you have geopolitical and fiscal risks that you build the future and on-shoring re-industrializing the U S and then the bottom one are exposure. Oil and natural gas, gold, copper, copper and mining. And then you take a look at uranium, oil, industrials and broad commodities. And was if I want to ask this, because this is a huge question that just changed this week. And that is coal, coal is now great again. And then we have 400, a ballpark, 391 power plants in the United States. And of the 391 power plants, 46 were slated to be shut down of those 46 to be shut down and they’re now saying we may extend them and or start exporting. And this is now enough. You just described the thing where we do better under war times. We’ve just didn’t put out the war time exemption act on coal.
Wasif Latif [00:10:00] Right. Yeah. Yeah, you know, coal in the in the Western economies is very little as in terms of the fuel that’s used. I’ll show you one charge to which whenever I present this, this is like one of the charts that people, their phones come out, they start taking pictures of it. And it really goes to its two things. Number one, the usage of energy continues to grow. And that’s just the nature of human development over time. And any time we create or develop a new source of energy or a more efficient way of generating energy, it doesn’t result in lowering our energy usage. It actually results in increasing our energy use because we then find more productive things to do with it. For example, nowadays you have. AI, and that’s a big energy user. So all the way at the bottom here, I don’t know if you can see the color distinction, but there’s this black section and that is coal. So coal has continued to rise alongside the overall usage of energy as has oil and natural gas, which are still the big three components of energy usage around the world, and this is global. But when you look at it on a regional basis, Coal is much more used by China and India more than any other place and we continue to use much more oil and natural gas. The beauty for us is natural gas is abundant, it’s cheap and it’s you know cleaner than the other stuff and so for those who are concerned about that it’s a great source of energy for us that’s abundant and cheap. Not only can we use it ourselves, we can also ship it and sell it to others around the world for a profit so i think you’re you’re right about that in terms of being being utilized and that’s why energy life is such a big part of our portfolio of how that’s just going to continue to grow and then the other part is is gold as you know and we can be happy to talk about that piece as well in terms the inflationary impact
Stuart Turley [00:12:00] When we take a look at this, please, what is your opinion on, because one of the key things about President Trump’s cabinet meeting that he had, he also mentioned that not only did Secretary Burgum add back into the U.S. Treasury holdings billions of dollars, but if not trillions of dollars of coal holdings and oil and gas holdings. So he’s making our balance. Sheet look better. That to me was extremely significant.
Wasif Latif [00:12:35] I think it speaks to the world we’re in, you know, the whole idea that for the better part of the last 20, 30 years, financial assets have done much better than physical assets, like commodities. And this is that chart that I’ve shown in the past. I’m sorry, I’m just jumping back and forth on charts, but-
Stuart Turley [00:12:52] This is fantastic.
Wasif Latif [00:12:53] This is, this is another one that people love is this is the ratio of the, the price or the performance of commodities versus the S and P 500. So as this line is going down, commodities are underperforming financial assets. And as this is rising commodities are outperforming financial assets, but as you can see, we’re, we’re bumping along the bottom here towards the bottom, right? And so it goes to the idea that, you know, comes back to our thesis again, is that the returning to tangibles, which is why we call it that, because the world is now coming back to the idea that it is not all about financial assets. Financial assets are a means to an end, but the end is actually physical assets that you need in the world to do things, accomplish things, and also be strong and capable. And so I think this rebuilding of the balance sheet, if you will, by including, I should say, tangible assets or physical assets, which includes gold and even other commodities. I think it just speaks to the time we’re in around the world, and many countries are doing that. As you know, since the 2022 war in Europe, global central banks have been increasing their purchase of gold, which is just talking about them diversifying away from financial assets like U.S. Treasuries. Into gold, for example, and here’s that chart showing you, you know, this is the bar chart showing the historical purchases of gold by central banks around the world, and then you see this jump that occurs in 2022 at a much higher level, and that’s continuing on.
Stuart Turley [00:14:29] This is this is huge now since you guys are really looking at commodities as coming as the tangible I was kind of surprised to see that he is adding Bitcoin as a crypto to the financial mix, but as a percentage of the advantage of the portfolio of holdings, it does not seem to be that big of a deal.
Wasif Latif [00:14:54] Yeah. We generally like Bitcoin and what its potential is for the future. Right. But the challenge is, as you said, it’s still a small-sized asset. Right. And because that it’s still in its early days when you compare its history, for example, to gold. Gold has been on for $5,000. And Bitcoin has been only around since 2008. So that’s almost two decades, not quite. So it’s still early. It’s new. It is an infant, if you will, when it comes to the maturity as a viable asset and currency. And because of that, there is a lot of, not only speculation, but also just volatility attached to it alongside risk assets. So we think that in the short term or the near term, it does behave similar to risk assets like stocks, like the NASDAQ, like tech, but over the long arc of history, looking out decades and decades, it’ll probably be continuing to grow and increase in importance, given what its potential is and what it can deliver in the future. We just don’t think we’re there yet. So I think it’s a good time to have a little bit of a new portfolio, but it, you know, You have to… Still take it with a grain of salt, that the volatility and the speculative nature of it is still in it for now.
Stuart Turley [00:16:20] So when we take a look at the stock market this week, holy smokes, when president Trump, when the rumors hit that the tariffs were off, boy, the market went nuts and so there was almost an overreaction to the misunderstanding of what president Trump is trying to get done, but the focus of your investment with everything that Samaria partners is doing. Is back to the basic i mean this is like holy smoke this is exactly what i think is a breath of fresh air if you don’t mind me saying it in that way of looking at as opposed to people making millions of millions of dollars and fifteen minutes and then losing millions of billions of dollars in fifteen minutes is that make sense.
Wasif Latif [00:17:10] Yeah, no, it certainly does. So a couple of thoughts come to mind. Number one, because of the high degree of uncertainty, because of the potential of an economic blowdown, potentially even a recession, you are seeing equities, which is a risky asset. And the broad market was richly valued, you’re seeing some of that volatility come into play. And, you know, if we are indeed in a longer drawn out bear market, and the thing about bear markets that you just never know you’re in them until you’re well after the fact, or you’re well into it. And so if we’re in one, this volatility of the huge swings we’re seeing up or is just the nature of that kind of a market. The largest single day market moves. Both up and down historically have occurred during bear market and the reason is the market sells off on fear of something occurring right then when you start to see a headline where okay maybe that’s not as bad or maybe this might not happen you see this immediate reaction and mechanically it actually For the most part, it turns out to be short covering. So if people are short shorting the market because they think it’s gonna go down, if you get a whiff of good news, then immediately they gotta start covering their short positions because they’re gonna get crossed the other side. So the violent swings that you see are generally a result of short covering in a market that may continue to go down because the broader narrative and the broader sort of the reality is one of being challenged. So the financial markets have done extremely well over these past 10, 15-odd years. And now, if you’re going to improve the broader economy, then there might be some frost in the market that needs to come out because companies will need to spend, their margins might get squeezed. If there is a protracted trade war, the big mega-cap tech companies might see some If the other countries start imposing, you know direct quotas or challenges or some kind of a you know Right half on them specifically. So I think all of that is being factored in into the market So you’re starting to see a lot of that volatility, but to your point the uncertainties there and We think that those swings are going to continue to be there until we do get some clarity and some resolution or the market grinds down to a point where it becomes cheap and it becomes attractive as a whole. So that’s the broader market. Our portfolio has held up during this period. It’s done very well because our allocation for the most part has been to gold and gold mining stocks. And those have done well because in times of uncertainty, in times. Fears of inflation, or even stagflation, and in times of geopolitical risk and, and high budget deficits, gold does really well. And so that’s been a great part of our portfolio. The energies life part of the portfolio has been dinged a little bit because of the whole, the OPEC production increase and the fears of an economic slowdown because of tariffs. But overall, our portfolios held up really well in this environment.
Stuart Turley [00:20:19] And that was one of the reasons that I had mentioned that we, we go through this is that your view on this is why I respect your opinion is because you have the overall look at this and, and people were panicking out there. And it’s nice to have a nice view of sanity for a brief moment, but right both as we’re recording this, we sit back and take a look of You know, the energy embargo that you had, you, you talked about in the panic in the past, and I keep going back to that one slide of how much it matches in there and how much we could see some problems. But Walmart put out a notice and said, even if China, we can’t get any shipping containers or anything, we’re going to be fine. And the rest of the world is not running to China. They’re running to have meetings with the president of the United States because China has not always been a very good business partner. This may be a real issue. I mean, as far as China is concerned, I mean it seems like the, the, the odds are stacking up in president Trump’s side of the fence. If it’s a fair.
Wasif Latif [00:21:35] I think the corporate uncertainty is definitely very high because they’re trying to figure out, you know, they’ve built up these supply chains over decades with leading with China, but other countries as well. And they’re trying to scramble to figure out what this means and how they can manage through that and work through that. I think, you know like a lot of things, if this is going to be the new normal, then you’re going to see companies trying to rethink their sourcing and their supply chains, and if the costs become relatively closer, then people are going to start rethinking that of how they’re going to manage it. What I’m saying is that building supply chains to your point earlier isn’t an overnight thing. It’s just going to take and time. And so the immediate impact to earnings… And to corporate profitability is going to be challenging is going to be negative in our view, because if nothing else happens, the cost of imports are going to go up. And if they turn around and find new sources of supplies, then those are also going to be increasing their cost, because now you’re going to set up all new sources of that stuff. So the transition is, you know, if it continues on and happens, then the transition will be challenging. One of the things that I’m sure you’ve heard of, that everybody’s talked about, Is that you know how much of this is a. Negotiation to be able to get better terms and to be able to extract better trading deals. So if that’s the case, then maybe they don’t need to build out something domestically or somewhere else. It’s just going to be a higher cost. And so that’s sort of the uncertainty that I’m talking about that companies and managements are thinking, well wait a second, is this something that just means our cost is going to go up and we just have to live with it? Or is this something that means we’re going to have to find a new more closer source of our supplies than we have currently. And those are two different questions and two different ways of reacting.
Stuart Turley [00:23:38] You are spot on. I just saw an article and I haven’t done the research on it, but it seems like the EU is now in a horrific financial bond bind where they’re now having to retool their own militaries and they’re looking at having their car company retool to build military equipment. So they’re not trying to get a EV deal with China. I did not have that one on my bingo card. So you look at, and so, and that brings up the oil issue that you mentioned with OPEC and OPEX plus, and I have on my bingo card that if the India eats growing and India seems to be one of the greatest countries right now as a bellwether is to what’s going on. I like the way. That prime minister Modi is trying to get energy to everybody in India so that they can continue to grow. If India continues to grow and import everything and China can remain stable, I can see us getting back to that $75 and $80 oil sooner than later because those are the two biggest oil importing countries in the world. Does that make sense?
Wasif Latif [00:24:59] Yeah, absolutely. And that’s our view as well, that the market has pummeled oil over the past two weeks for two reasons. One is, we might go into a recession, the demand is going to go down. The other reason is, well, now OPEC is increasing their supply. So we have a whole lot more supply in the market and that’s going to push prices down. I think markets, as you know, they react immediately to the news and we take a longer from view. And Warren Buffett has famously said that, you know, the financial markets are a mechanism of, and I’m paraphrasing him, are a mechanism for extracting wealth from the inpatient to the patient. And so we take a long term view on that. And so our view is that oil is seeing challenges right now. It’s being pushed down, but that’s a short term view. If you go back further, if you go further in time and look at a longer term basis, China will continue to grow and consume, albeit at a smaller, lower pace. India, and that’s part of the sub-theme chart that I had of building the future, that is about the billion plus people in Asia who are going to continue to grow and increase their carbon footprint. So India has projected that they’re going to double their GDP over the next 10, 12 years. That’s going to lead a lot of energy. That’s gonna have a lot more people consuming energy. And so, the same thing is going to be for other countries in Asia as well, which might be smaller. When you put them all together, that’s just going to a big growth part of it. So that’s why to me, that chart that shows the gradual rise of demand over time is very telling. It’s just going, it’s not going to stop. And so we think that that’s going to continue on and the market is hearing about something that’s happening or might happen in the next six months or 12 months. And our view is, well, what’s going happen over the next five to seven years.
Stuart Turley [00:26:48] You are such a breath of fresh air that I really appreciate you taking your the time out of your busy day to jump on the podcast because your ability to explain things and a lot easier in a very calm manner really help refresh my view of my, I’m not panicking because I understand and, and, and my investments I’m doing quite well in, so I’m doing fine because I look at things a little more like you do. And so I’m not in this panicking, but how do people find your fund and what you’ve got going on?
Wasif Latif [00:27:22] So we have we have an ETF. Which in which we manage the strategy in the ticker is lens L E N S it’s easy to remember we look through the lens of you know the markets and the views to come up with a portfolio for our investors they can find information on it on any platform and the direct way to get information is surmaiaetf.com website. That’s surmaiasarmayaetf dot com. Is probably the best place to get information on it.
Stuart Turley [00:27:55] Boy, we will be including that in the show notes. And I really thank you for your time today, Wasif. And how do people get a hold of you on LinkedIn?
Wasif Latif [00:28:04] Yeah, so LinkedIn, if they type in my name, Wasif, last name Latif, they should be able to find me. And I’m also on Substack with the same name. So and I’m and I am writing and I post a lot these kind of thoughts, also our views and things like that. So be happy to get in touch with folks.
Stuart Turley [00:28:20] I’ll tell you what, thank you again. And I’m looking forward to our next one because your breath of fresh air sanity in the financial world is very critical right now. So I do appreciate you. Thanks for stopping by the podcast.
Wasif Latif [00:28:34] Thank you so much too, really appreciate you having me on.
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