By 2015 Hard Commodity Prices Will Have Collapsed

For the past two years, as regular readers know, I have been bearish on hard commodities. Prices may have dropped substantially from their peaks during this time, but I don’t think the bear market is over. I think we still have a very long way to go.

There are four reasons why I expect prices to drop a lot more.　First, during the last decade commodity producers were caught by surprise by the surge in demand. Their belated response was to ramp up production dramatically, but since there is a long lead-time between intention and supply, for the next several years we will continue to experience rapid growth in supply. As an aside, in my many talks to different groups of investors and boards of directors it has been my impression that commodity producers have been the slowest at understanding the full implications of a Chinese rebalancing, and I would suggest that in many cases they still have not caught on.

Second, almost all the increase in demand in the past twenty years, which in practice occurred mostly in the past decade, can be explained as the consequence of the incredibly unbalanced growth process in China. But as even the most exuberant of China bulls now recognize, China’s economic growth is slowing and I expect it to decline a lot more in the next few years.

Third, and more importantly, as China’s economy rebalances towards a much more sustainable form of growth, this will automatically make Chinese growth much less commodity intensive. It doesn’t matter whether you agree or disagree with my expectations of further economic slowing. Even if China is miraculously able to regain growth rates of 10-11% annually, a rebalancing economy will demand much less in the way of hard commodities.

And fourth, surging Chinese hard commodity purchases in the past few years supplied not just growing domestic needs but also rapidly growing inventory. The result is that inventory levels in China are much too high to support what growth in demand there will be over the next few years, and I expect Chinese in some cases to be net sellers, not net buyers, of a number of commodities.

This combination of factors – rising supply, dropping demand, and lots of inventory to work off – all but guarantee that the prices of hard commodities will collapse. I expect that certain commodities, like copper, will drop by 50% or more in the next two to three years.

Not everyone agrees. In the July 17 article in Bloomberg:

Rubber is poised to drop as sustained supplies from Southeast Asia and falling demand from China’s tiremakers push stockpiles to match their record at Qingdao port, the main shipment hub, an industry executive said. Futures fell for the first time in four days.

Inventories in the bonded zone, where traders store deliveries before paying duties, will probably climb to 250,000 metric tons by end-August from 240,000 tons last week, Li Xiangou, chairman at the Qingdao International Rubber Exchange Market, said in an Aug. 17 interview. China accounts for 33 percent of global demand and tires represent 70 percent of natural-rubber consumption in the country. Reserves last reached 250,000 tons in mid-January, he said.

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The article goes on to quote one Chinese rubber trader as saying “Many Chinese tire makers are mired in high inventories of end-products right now.”

I can easily cite many more articles, but as this short roundup suggests, finding articles about huge stockpiles in China is a pretty easy game to play. This shouldn’t come as a surprise and indeed I have been discussing this for the past three or four years. When financing costs are low or even negative in any economy, there is a tendency to accumulate inventory since it is not only easy to finance but, thanks to low or negative financing costs, it can also be extremely profitable. If prices just keep up with inflation, inventory earns a profit, and the greater the pile, the greater the profit.

In addition in the past decade as China’s trade relationship with the rest of the world has expanded and as China’s economy has grown, most Chinese businesses have only experienced rising prices – both for commodities and many kinds of goods. As a result firms that tended to hold high inventory have outperformed firms that haven’t.

This has created a selection process that favors accumulation. Companies that prefer to hold more, rather than less, inventory of commodities and goods in which commodities are a high cost component have outperformed their rivals, and so the whole market has moved towards a preference for stockpiling, much in the same way that, according to Hyman Minsky, periods of stable or rising asset prices force the financial system into taking on excessive risk. Since overstocking has always been a winning strategy until very recently, it is a pretty safe bet to assume that Chinese traders, speculators, end-users and investors have a built-in prejudice towards being long or longer inventory.

The overstocking problem in part has also had to do with financing constraints. In late 2010 and early 2011 in this newsletter I wrote often about commodity inventory financing as a popular tactic among Chinese businesses and banks aimed at getting around regulatory constraints on lending.

By importing commodities that were funded through trade financing and then using inventory receipts to borrow domestically, banks and borrowers could get around lending restrictions. We have never been able to figure out exactly how much of this was going on, but there was plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that this was a pretty wide-spread scheme and it involved a variety of commodities – copper, most famously, but also soy, magnesium, cotton, rubber and several others.

Finally, I should add that in China there is, more than in any other country I know, a sense that physical ownership of commodities or of commodity producing facilities creates substantial intangible benefits.　This may be a legacy of Maoist perceptions of self-sufficiency, or it may have to do with a history of unstable political and monetary arrangements, but whatever the reason Chinese are often obsessed with the need for physical control of commodities.

The result has been a tendency to hold much larger commodity inventories than can be justified by business needs and risk management concerns. By the way when economists try to calculate the amount of unsold inventory of commodities they typically focus on the raw commodity, but it is important to remember that inventories of finished goods are also forms of raw inventory.

An empty apartment, for example, contains lots of copper wiring, and although it is extremely unlikely that the copper will ever be melted down and sold, it nonetheless has the same price effect as unsold copper inventory. Why? Because an empty apartment today is one less apartment that will be built tomorrow to fill real demand, and so it represents a reduction in the future amount of copper that will be purchased to make copper wire. The same is true of other finished goods.

What about demand?

China currently is the leading consumer of a wide variety of commodities wholly disproportionate to its share of global GDP. The country represents roughly 11% of global GDP if you accept the stated numbers, and substantially less if you believe, as I do, that growth has been overstated because of the difference over many years between reported investment, i.e. its input value, and the actual economic value of output. China nonetheless accounts for between 30% and 40% of total global demand for commodities like copper and nearly 60% of total global demand for commodities like cement and iron ore.

The only reason China has provided such an extraordinarily disproportionate share of global demand for hard commodities has been the nature of China’s growth model. While China may represent only 11% or less of the global economy, it represents a far, far greater share of the world’s building of bridges, railroad lines, subway systems, skyscrapers, port facilities, dams, shipbuilding facilities, highways, and so on.

Over the next decade, two things are going to change. The first is increasingly recognized, and that is that Chinese growth rates will drop sharply. The second is that China will rebalance its economic growth away from its appetite for commodities.

The consensus on expected economic growth among Chinese and foreign economist living in China has already declined sharply in the past few years. From 8-10% just two years ago, the consensus for average growth rates in China over the next decade has dropped to 5-7%. But the historical precedents suggest we should be wary even of these lower estimates. Throughout the last 100 years countries that have enjoyed investment-driven growth miracles have always had much more difficult adjustments than even the greatest skeptics had predicted.

After all, there were many Brazilians in the late 1970s who worried that Brazil’s growth miracle was unsustainable and would end badly, but none expected negative growth for a decade, which is what happened during the terrible Lost Decade of the 1980s. Towards the end of the 1980s, to take another example, a few brave skeptics proclaimed that the Japanese miracle was dead and predicted that for the next five or ten years average Japanese growth rates would slow to 3 or 4% (in 1994 the IMF belatedly proclaimed that Japan’s long-term growth rate had dropped to 4%), but no one, even the most skeptical, predicted twenty years of growth below 1 percent. Finally when the USSR’s economy was hurtling forward in the 1950s and 1960s, and expected to overtake the US within a few decades, even the most die-hard anti-communists did not expect the virtual collapse of the economy in the 1970s and 1980s.

Similarly, the current consensus for Chinese growth over the next decade is almost certainly too high. Even if Beijing is able to keep household income growing at the same pace it has grown during the past decade, when Chinese and global conditions were as good as they ever could be, it will prove almost impossible for the economy to rebalance at average GDP growth rates over the next decade of much above 3 percent.

This 3% average will not be distributed evenly, of course, and we should expect higher growth rates at the beginning of the period (perhaps 5-6 percent over the next two years) and lower growth rates towards the end. But as this happens, over the next two years the consensus on China’s long-term growth rate will continue to drop sharply, and this will further affect commodity prices.

But even this underestimates the change in demand for commodities. For thirty years, and especially for the past ten years, China’s extraordinary GDP growth was driven by even higher rates of investment growth – generating for China the highest investment rates and investment growth rates in history. Consumption growth failed to keep pace during this time.

But rebalancing means, by definition, that for the next few years consumption growth must outpace GDP growth, and so also by definition investment growth must be less than GDP growth. Even if China is able to achieve 5-7% growth rates over the next decade, which I think is almost impossible, this implies that consumption growth will rise to 7-10% annually, and so from 25% growth in the last few years Beijing will be able to allow investment to grow no more than 2-4% annually, and much less if GDP growth rates are as low as I expect.

Which way can prices go?

For these reasons I am very pessimistic about hard commodity prices and expect them to drop substantially further in the next two to three years.

1. Production capacity for hard commodities is rising much too quickly, in a belated response to the unexpected surge in demand just under a decade ago.
2. Expected economic growth rates in the country that has been biggest source of new demand – virtually the only source – have fallen sharply and commodity prices have fallen with them. Historical precedents and the arithmetic of rebalancing suggest, however, that the current consensus for medium-term Chinese growth is still too optimistic. Expected growth rates will almost certainly fall further in the next two years.
3. Beijing has finally become serious about rebalancing China’s economy, and rebalancing means shifting Chinese growth away from being disproportionately commodity intensive. Instead of representing 30-60% of global demand for most hard commodities, Chinese demand will shift to a more “normal” level. Remember that even a very limited shift – from 50% of global demand, for example, to a still high 40% of global demand – represents a sharp drop in global demand.
4. There has been so much stockpiling of commodities and finished goods with implicit commodity content in China that the country could well become a net seller, and not net a buyer, of a wide variety of commodities in the next few years.

This is going to come as a shock to many people. 　In my discussions with senior officials in the commodity sectors in Brazil, Australia, Peru, Chile and even Indonesia, it seems to me that many analysts have been insufficiently skeptical about the Chinese growth model and are unaware of how dramatically the consensus has changed in the past two years. They have failed to understand how deep China’s structural problems are and how worried Beijing has become (this worry may be best exemplified by the extraordinary growth in flight capital from China since early 2010).

Under these conditions I don’t see how we can avoid a very nasty two or three years ahead for commodity producers. This isn’t all bad news, of course. What will be a disaster for hard commodity producers will be great news for companies and countries that are commodity users or importers. One way or the other, however, we are going see a big change in the distribution of winners and losers.

This is an abbreviated version of the newsletter that went out three weeks ago. Academics, journalists, and government and NGO officials who want to subscribe to the newsletter should write to me at chinfinpettis@yahoo.com, stating your affiliation, please. Investors who want to buy a subscription should write to me, also at that address.

Written By: Michael Pettis