At the moment, nearly all commodities are touching lows. Anybody who has anything to do with commodities – unless they’ve sold them short or unless they use commodities, are losers, except gold. But everybody who uses oil is a winner right now – Germany, China, Japan. People who consume oil think this is heaven. They think they’ve won the jackpot. Gold is up over the past seven or eight years. This is higher now than it was since 2011. So every commodity user is benefiting right now.
How do you see commodity markets panning out for the rest of 2020 and in early 2021?
I would suspect that most commodities now are close to the bottom. We’re in a period where the cure for low prices is low prices. In other words, when prices get very low, people use more of it and the producer produces less. China has opened up. Other countries are opening up again. So demand will go up again and prices will go up again. As I look around the world and all asset classes, the cheapest asset class I can see right now are commodities. Certainly not bonds – bonds are in a bubble. Most currencies are certainly not overpriced but certainly not as cheap as they might be. Stocks are certainly not dirt cheap anywhere. Everything I see that’s historically very cheap – that’s commodities.
S&P Global Ratings has said that the coronavirus pandemic is dragging the global economy into a recession. How long do you think it might take us to get out of it?
The last time I spoke with Platts, I said that the next time we have an economic problem in the world, it would be the worst in my lifetime. And it is – here it is. It’s not over yet. It’s going to get worse before it’s over.
There’s going to be some rallies. But there’s too much debt. America was the largest debtor nation in the history of the world. And in the last month, Americans added several trillion – trillion with a T – dollars of debt and printed huge amounts of money. So the damage which is being done is going to take a while for people to recover from. There’s an election in November.
They all want to be elected in November. All they care about is getting elected. But in the future, America’s got a problem of gigantic debt, not just at the national level, but also at the level of states, cities, as well and individuals.
This is going to take a long time. In 1920, Great Britain was the richest, most powerful country in the world. But they started spending money and borrowing – doing the things that America is doing now.
They lost. I live in Singapore. Many companies in Singapore are going bankrupt. This is going to leave a lot of scars and a lot of damage.
- Source, SPGlobal
