What we know from the 70s is that if you have a recession at a time of fast money supply growth that what happens is that the stock groups that tend to do best during the recession and to lead you out of the recession tend to be commodities. So the commodities stocks of course, were just hammered after the ‘midnight massacre’ of July 13, 2008 which is what really launched deflation in the world. But what’s interesting is what’s happened to them since then in relative strength. We come back to my old faithful of the IBD’s 197 industry subgroup rankings and what changes there are in that from week to week. This week, if we take the top 21 stock groups, we see that 7 of them, that is one-third of them are commodity groups led, of course, once again, by metals, ores, gold and silver; they’ve been at the top for some time. But we’ve got food flour and grain; we’ve got oil and gas transport pipeline, we’ve got oil and gas refining and marketing, I feel very good about the fact that pure refiners have done so well, I can tell you. Food, miscellaneous preparation, retail, wholesale food; and Oil and Gas, International Exploration and Production interestingly enough.
So, what that tells me is that this is the kind of swing at a time when everything looked bad, back in 1974, and by the way, things looked much worse then than they do now, in 1974. We were down to a 6 mulitple on the Dow. And the belief in equities as an asset class was being abandoned on all sides and unemployment was double digit levels and governments were falling; things were much much worse then. But, what you could see was the relative strength of the commodity groups, including, by the way, the supermarkets back then, which is interesting, because the supermarkets are doing well now. So, I would therefore like to take the view that what signals we’re getting for the market are that the market like all the pundits, isn’t sure that this $2-trillion that’s being thrown at the system is going to work. But the belief is if it does work, we’re going to have a greater demand for scarce assets, and that everybody recognizes that the huge selloff that we’ve had in commodities and commodities stocks means that scarcities could come back pretty quickly. And that’s exactly what happened in the 70s.
Now, I’m quite sure there’s a lot of you out there saying ‘you keep talking about the 70s, and its a different world.’ It is in many respects, but only in one, I think, that’s really crucial, and that is on the real estate side. Because back then what we had was the baby boomers were university graduates having to live with their parents or grandparents because there were no houses available for them. There was a housing shortage because of course, there was no way they could expand the housing market fast enough to take cognizance of the huge number of baby boomers coming out of high schools, community colleges, and universities; well we havn;t anything like that this time, because of the birth dearth that began back then. What we have is a situation where the housing supply was built on the assumption that things would be the same as they had been every other cycle and of course they aren’t the same, and they will never be the same the next 50 years. So that’s the big difference. We have demographic deflation across the industrial world and in that sense, what it means is that there is one asset class which cannot behave as it did back then. And back then, house prices, although it took them a while to start moving up, even though we had inflation, they did. In any case, you didn’t lose money on housing back then.
I think that the fact that the oil stocks, despite the fact that spot WTI has gone to a new low, the oil stocks are actually starting to perform better, is people’s recognition that with the cutbacks that OPEC has already delivered and then the evidence that US consumption hasn’t fallen by 5%, 6%, or 7% as people thought; those statistics were clouded by what the retail gasoline sales were; and of course, what they did, because retail gasoline was down by 50%, was in trying to adjust for this after you took out state taxes and all these things, people got wrong what the actual volumes there were. So what we see is that the actual demand for oil in the world has not fallen off a cliff. Yes, the demand for industrial goods and consumer goods and ? and things like that has fallen of a cliff. But certainly not for most commodities, and particularly, not for oil. And with the move that we’re getting in the fertilizers, and I’d just like to mention once again, the value of the IBD survey, because way down, you get way down the list, number 56 on the list, and you see chemicals and fertilzers [12:23] but that this week and three weeks ago they were down in the depths at 154 and the charts show you that there has been a huge change in attitude towards the fertilizers and indeed towards the agricultural stocks generally.
Now, that’s not because I think the world has embraced our view of the strong possibility that the two centuries of global warming have come to an end, and that we might be entering a period of global cooling which would dramatically affect the outlook for crops in the northern hemisphere. No, I think its simply once again the recognition that although demand is reduced somewhat for key grains and feedgrains as a result of the economic slowdown, that it has not collapsed and the carry overs even though they’re bigger than they were a year ago, are not so great as to suggest that the prices farmers are going to get for their grain are going to be profitable. Yes, spot corn is $3.66, but the new corn that hasn’t been planted yet, which will be delivered in December is $4.07, and corn for the next year after that is $4.25. These are prices, that if you’re a farmer who does a good job producing it, could make a lot of money on it, despite the collapse in demand for ethanol. So, what I’m basically saying is that we already have two commodity groups which in the last few weeks have been moving up strongly, and they’re basically saying that you don’t have to take a bet on how the Obama program works out, as to whether or not this recession is going to drag out a couple more years. You can make money here.
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