Time to say thank you to the world’s commodity investors

The commodity bust has brought us cheap petrol and continuing low interest rates. We should be grateful to those who financed the monumental misallocation of capital that made it all possible.

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Comodity investors financed the misallocation of capital the provided an oversupply

In the 15 years since we launched MoneyWeek, we have seen three major bubbles come and go.

The first was the tech bubble of 2000 (this was scary it kicked off only a very short time after we printed our first ever issue). The second was the housing (and banking) bubble that collapsed in 2008 (this wasn't scary we were ready!) and the third was the commodity bubble that is just crawling to its nasty end at the moment (see oil).

We tend to look at all these bubbles from the investor's point of view, assuming that their collapses are horribly painful for everyone. But as a note from Phoenix Asset Management points out, that isn't necessarily so.

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The ordinary investor (whose money has been in passive funds or in passive funds pretending to be active funds) has had a miserable time, of course. But for those who don't invest (or pay no attention to fact that someone else is doing it for you) and have stayed in regular employment, the effect of the regular booms and busts has been "overwhelmingly positive."

The telecommunications, media and technology (TMT) bubble lured investors into paying to build the infrastructure needed for the internet, and then effectively handed it over to consumers for free.

The great bust of 2008 gave the same consumers super-low interest rates if you had hung on to your job and you owned a home, your mortgage payments collapsed and your personal finances improved pleasantly as a result.

Finally, the commodities boom has hugely increased the supply of every resource under the sun. That supply now exceeds demand with the happy result that the ordinary worker should soon be seeing a further improvement to his bank balance: petrol is already much cheaper than it was, and most other things we consume (heating, travel, almost all physical products) soon will be too.

It is also worth noting that the commodity bust, in bringing with it another round of deflationary pressure (something that the falling yuan will add too), is likely to delay interest-rate normalisation in the UK. With oil prices in freefall, global markets a mess, UK GDP looking pretty iffy and the US Federal Reserve clearly beginning to regret their baby rate rise last year, it is hard to see the Bank of England raising rates in the first half of this year.

It won't occur to most people to be grateful to global investors for paying for all this (via their financing of the misallocation of capital that has given us the over-supply) but if you aren't invested in the commodities sector you might think about thanking any friends who are/have been.

Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.