If It’s in the Ground, It Can Only Go Down

As playwright Arthur Miller once observed, "An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted." And most of the illusions that defined the late global economic boom—the notion that global growth had moved to a permanently higher plane and housing prices from Miami to Mumbai would rise indefinitely—are now indeed exhausted. Yet one idea still has the power to capture imaginations and markets: it is that commodities like oil, copper, grains and gold are all destined to rise over time. Lots of smart people believe that last year's swoon in commodities prices represented a short pause in a long-term bull market.

It's a view rooted in powerful and real trends, like the growth of China and India, the decline in global reserves (many of the world's biggest and best oilfields are tapped out), fears over resource nationalization (independent oil firms now control only 20 percent of global reserves) and long-term underinvestment in energy and agriculture, which hampers supply.

Yet the fact is that the world has faced all these issues before, and for the past 200 years, commodity prices have been trending downwards, thanks to new technologies, greater efficiency in extraction and the substitution of one commodity for another (which explains the high correlation between commodities prices). Bank Credit Analyst, a research firm based in Montreal, has data showing major industrial commodity prices are 75 percent below where they were in the year 1800, after adjusting for inflation. Despite all the worries over "peak oil," the fact is that the major bear markets in oil have been demand, rather than supply led. And when demand eventually picks up, there's usually some new alternative (nuclear energy, natural gas, green technologies) waiting to pick up some of the slack. The real price of oil today is now at the same level as in 1976 and, before that, in the 1870s, when oil was first put to mass use in the United States. This long-term price decline is due mainly to the constant discovery of new fields and greater energy efficiency, making nonsense of the idea that the world is rapidly running out of oil. The experience of the 1980s is instructive in the current context as well.

Japan and Europe continued to grow strongly in the 1980s, and yet oil consumption remained essentially flat through that decade as both the regions strived to achieve better fuel efficiency and switched to alternative sources of energy, such as nuclear power. Similarly, 90 percent of the growth in new oil capacity since 2004 has come from biofuels, synthetic oil and natural-gas liquids. As countries get richer, their per capita consumption of commodities declines. It's a myth, then, that the boom in China and India will inexorably drive up oil and other commodity prices.

At any point in time, there are always new economic powers emerging on the global scene, yet commodity prices have continued to fall. The 1980s and '90s were a relatively strong period for the global economy, and China was growing at an average pace of 9 percent. But prices for most commodities did not follow: oil, for example, never broke through the upper limit of $40 a barrel.

The reason oil prices did not spike higher is simple: demand for any commodity is price-elastic, which means that once the price goes too high, consumers stop buying it or make heroic efforts to find a substitute. In the 1960s and '70s, the revival of manufacturing in Japan and Europe propelled prices for industrial metals like copper and nickel higher, until the buyers couldn't take it anymore. Total spending on copper peaked at 0.45 percent of the global economy in the mid-1960s, and on nickel at 0.2 percent in the 1970s. Once copper prices got too high, aluminum was used as a substitute in many functions. As commodities are inputs in themselves, they can justify only a certain share of the total costs before it becomes prohibitive to consume the end product.

There is good reason to believe that the world just passed a similar turning point. The last boom in the oil prices collapsed in 1979, when total spending on oil exceeded 7 percent of global GDP. Last year, spending on oil hit a similar share of global GDP, and the price has since fallen by more than two thirds. Last year prices of other critical commodities, including copper, zinc and lead, also reached peaks not seen since the 1960s or '70s, before falling back to earth.

Yet markets are still betting that the price of oil is poised to spike again. Oil for delivery in three years' time is trading at close to $70 a barrel, compared with the current spot price of about $50 a barrel. Some analysts predict $90 a barrel by 2012. Prices of other commodities, from copper to rice, are also expected to rise.

It's worth noting that until as recently as 2005, the markets acted on the exact opposite assumption. For years, spot prices ran much higher than futures prices, because most investors assumed prices would follow the historic trend line: down. They made money by simply rolling over their oil contracts at a lower price. Commodities were otherwise seen as a losing proposition—and for good reason. But the long view died with the commodity price boom of this decade, and it has yet to return. Today investors are still reacting to any sign of health in the global economy by pouring money back into commodities, producing the erratic upward price swings we've seen in recent weeks.