Tuesday, March 4, 2014

"Commodities’ Base is Crumbling"

Following up on Feb. 27's "Chartology: The Reversal in the CRB Commodity Index".
We are dreaming of $5.00 corn, the rest of the commods, especially the metals, meh.

From MoneyBeat:
Commodity bulls live and die by metrics of Chinese demand. So the analytical folks at Sanford C. Bernstein reviewed the scope of that demand through another, less-used indicator: China’s completion and announcement of infrastructure projects.

Big-ticket projects such as nuclear plants and high-speed rail that took off during Beijing’s stimulus splurge to fend off the financial crisis are winding down. The appetite to replace these with similar-sized projects is waning, Bernstein’s Michael Parker says. New ventures coming up are mostly smaller scale, such as subway tracks and electrical transmission lines.

It is hard to quantify the overall economic impact from this reduced activity. But infrastructure accounts for 17% of Chinese investment, so any sign of such activity easing will ripple through raw materials markets....MORE