Commodity Supercycles.

Hit the 're-tweet' & help us educate more investors.

A micro thread 🧵👇

1/ What is a commodity supercycle?

They are near decade long periods where commodities trade well above their price trend

supercycles are rare

Going back 100 years, Only 3-4 supercycles have been identified & each was tied to a transformational period of economic development.
2/ A one-two year rally in commodity prices is NOT a supercycle, rather could just a rebound from an imp. event as what even happened after the 2008 great recession.
3/ Two commodity supercycles have occurred since the end of World War II.

The 1st started in the mid of 1960s & lasted through the 1970s.

Likely driven by a collapsing US dollar, higher inflation & 2 oil price shocks.
4/ Why US dollar is an important monitorable?

Raw materials are almost always priced in US dollars.

When the value of the dollar drops, it costs more dollars to buy commodities. At the same time, it costs a lesser amount of other currencies when the dollar is moving lower.
5/ The last supercycle lasted from the mid-1990s until the 2008 financial crisis.

Reason? 'BRIC'

During this time, Brazil, Russia, India & China (BRIC: 40% of the world's population) were on a path of rapid industrialisation, which required an abnormal amount of raw materials.
6/
So, How many people predicted the last supercycles? Not many.

Supercycles are best defined in hindsight.

So, it will be years from now before we truly know whether we are witnessing the start of a new commodity supercycle.

End of Thread.

More from ᴀɴɪsʜ ᴍᴏᴏɴᴋᴀ

More from Commodities

You May Also Like

Great article from @AsheSchow. I lived thru the 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980's/early 1990's asking myself "Has eveyrbody lost their GODDAMN MINDS?!"


The 3 big things that made the 1980's/early 1990's surreal for me.

1) Satanic Panic - satanism in the day cares ahhhh!

2) "Repressed memory" syndrome

3) Facilitated Communication [FC]

All 3 led to massive abuse.

"Therapists" -and I use the term to describe these quacks loosely - would hypnotize people & convince they they were 'reliving' past memories of Mom & Dad killing babies in Satanic rituals in the basement while they were growing up.

Other 'therapists' would badger kids until they invented stories about watching alligators eat babies dropped into a lake from a hot air balloon. Kids would deny anything happened for hours until the therapist 'broke through' and 'found' the 'truth'.

FC was a movement that started with the claim severely handicapped individuals were able to 'type' legible sentences & communicate if a 'helper' guided their hands over a keyboard.
So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.