Komodity – budú sa opakovať 70-te roky?

With the price of commodities — agricultural, energy and others — booming, there are lots of comparisons with the farm boom of the 1970s being mentioned. While there is no way to predict where we go from here, it’s worth taking a look at some of the historical precedents for this kind of unusual action.

It might be worth noting that a 30-year cycle has governed commodities for more than a century. Prices peaked in 1920, 1950 and 1980 and the math would put the next peak at 2010, which doesn’t seem too outrageous to consider at this point. All of those cycles were characterized by some similarities — primarily a long period of relatively low and stable prices lasting 20 to 25 years followed by a relatively brief period of sharp appreciation in the final 5 to 10 years, which was in turn followed by a collapse back into a new cycle and another long, stable basing period. In all of those cases, inflation induced by war spending was a factor in the end boom. I’m not inclined to view this sort of cycle work as absolutely predictive but it is worth pondering.

Looking at the ’70s as the most recent example, the cost of simultaneously expanding social spending and funding the war in Vietnam came together to heat up inflationary pressures in the U.S. by the early ’70s. Farming and land prices boomed through the decade. By 1979, opinion was swinging toward the view that inflation was the primary economic concern and President Jimmy Carter was forced to nominate hardliner Paul Volker as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Volker took a couple of early shots at inflation and didn’t even faze it. Then he got serious and brought out the big gun of monetary targeting — basically squeezing the money supply until interest rates rose sharply above the rate of inflation. The result was that the speculators, farmers and builders who were riding the inflationmobile got smashed against the windshield. Game over, reset the cycle.

Zdroj: CommodityOnline.com

17.03.2008