Пища для ума - Food for thought. Коломейцева Е.М - 67 стр.

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until delivery is due. This hoarding should show up in higher stocks of unsold oil, but official oil stocks are well below their average
of the past five years. The same is true for many other commodities.
The absence of hoarding is not conclusive proof of speculators’ innocence. As Roger Bootle of Capital Economics has pointed
out, arbitrageurs must simply want to hold bigger stocks; they do not have to succeed. In markets where supply is constrained, their
attempts to hoard could push up spot prices without any increase in physical stocks, at least temporarily. Moreover, in some
commodities, particularly those that are mined or pumped, producers can reduce supply simply by holding back production. Oil
producers, for instance, can simply pump less. But there is scant evidence that this has happened. As prices soared in the first half of
this year, oil experts reckoned that most producers were pumping at full capacity. Saudi Arabia is the only large producer with spare
capacity; if anything, it pushed up production this year.
All told, the case that speculators drove the commodity boom is weak. To be sure, futures markets can overshoot, and investors
may have added temporary fuel, particularly in the first half of 2008. But the long rise in commodity prices – and their recent decline
– can be explained much more easily by economic fundamentals.
Too much, too little, too late
Over the past 50 years commodity prices have, on average, fallen relative to other goods and services as their supply has more
than kept up with demand. As population growth and greater affluence increased the world’s demand for calories, for instance,
agricultural productivity grew, which in turn increased supply. But this broad downward trend included plenty of volatility and
several big shocks, notably in the 1970s when commodity prices of all sorts soared for several years.
One reason for those price swings was that neither the supply of nor the demand for commodities can change quickly. People
have to eat, even if a bad harvest temporarily reduces the world’s grain stocks. It takes years to develop an oil field. In economists’
jargon, the price elasticity of both demand and supply is low in the short term. So any surprises on either side quickly translate into
big price changes.
The 1970s commodity shocks were mostly set off by unexpected shortfalls in supply. Culprits included the Arab oil embargo of 1973,
catastrophic harvests in 1972 and 1974 and the Iranian revolution in 1979. This decade’s boom, by contrast, was due largely to
unexpectedly strong demand.
The world economy grew faster for longer than anyone foresaw. In its forecasts of April 2003, for instance, the IMF expected
average global growth below 4 % a year over the following three years. In fact, the world economy grew at an annual average of
4.5 % between 2003 and 2007. This boom was driven by emerging economies, which grew at an average pace of 7.3 % a year. In
2003 the IMF expected China’s economy, for example, to grow by 7.5 % a year, but in fact it has grown at an average annual rate of
10.6 % a year since then. Not only did emerging economies grow unexpectedly fast, but at this stage of development their use of
commodities becomes more intense as they get richer. The result was a dramatic rise in demand, particularly for energy and industrial
commodities.
Take oil. In the four years from 1998 to 2002 world oil demand grew at an average rate of 1.1 % a year. Between 2003 and 2007
the pace almost doubled, to an average of 2.1 %, and almost all the increase came from the emerging world (oil demand in the OECD
countries has been falling since 2006). In 2007 China alone accounted for one-third of the increase in global oil demand. In products
such as most metals it made up an even bigger share.
Where governments have gone wrong
Rising prosperity, however, is not the whole story behind stronger demand. Government-induced distortions have also blunted
price signals. In many emerging economies governments control the prices of important fuels, such as diesel, and keep them below
world-market levels. Oil-exporting countries are the worst offenders. Whereas the American price is close to a dollar per litre, for
instance, Saudi Arabia sells petrol at 13 cents and Venezuela at 16 cents (see chart 7). Tellingly, the Middle Eastern oil exporters have
seen a big increase in oil consumption. In 2007 they accounted for a quarter of the rise in global oil demand even though they
represent a far smaller share of the world economy.

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