Finite room for construction in China

China's explosive demand will finally drop from its stratospheric level, either because China's economic development falters or because China is finally totally covered over in cement.

That is Rick Bookstaber, a deeply thoughtful blogger on financial markets, in response to Jeremy Grantham's newsletter on "the mother of all paradigm shifts" (i.e., "Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever"), which excited the likes of Cowen and Krugman.

Like Rick I am in the less apocalyptic camp, although for much prosaic reasons (he believes that eventually our resource consumption will decrease as we increasingly lead virtual lives and turn away from material consumption). As Tyler Cowen says, China cannot continue to invest 50% of its GDP forever. There is a long way to go for the world to catch up to rich-world consumption levels, but it also won't happen all at once (apply an optimistic GDP growth rate to your favorite sub-Saharan African country and you'll be shocked at how long it will take to get where China's income is today, even if everything goes well). Resource demand may not be curbed any time soon, but ultimately I have more faith in the power of prices and markets to change behavior than the doomsayers seem to.

Commodities not an asset class

I'm reading old Rick Bookstaber posts on the advice of a friend, and he is quite a thoughtful guy. I found this snippet from his post on asset allocation interesting:

Commodities do not form an asset class
This sounds heretical given what we have seen oil and gold do recently, but a lot of the reason that has happened is precisely because people are treating them as an asset class when they are not.

Commodities are not assets. They are factors of production. They do not generate returns, they have no claim on production. They have supply that flows out at a nearly fixed rate short term, and they comprise very small markets compared to the financial markets. If pension funds all decided to put two percent of their capital into commodities, two things would happen. First, that two percent would be a rounding error in their returns, no matter how commodities behaved. Second, they would swamp the supply of the commodities for economic purposes – i.e. for their true role as factors of production. I agree with Michael Masters’ view that oil prices were pushed up by this sort of financial activity. I might quibble with one chart or another, I might not couch it in the loaded terms of speculation. But the subsequent behavior of the market demonstrated that he was right and Goldman and others who took the opposing view were wrong.

This is an interesting take on the "speculation in commodities" debate - that financial investors played a big role in the commodity price boom, but that it was institutional investors, not nimble hedge funds, who were the financial market movers. And in this case, probably inadvertently so, and probably not lucratively either, since its hard to imagine them getting out of the way in time. A much different story than Bookstaber sees playing out in gold, by the way.