A miserable decade for commodity contrarians

All this talk of commodity super cycles is baloney. Lots of clever people are using some very interesting case studies (selectively) to build a grand narrative that essentially results in a small number of people making a lot of money from the rest of us.

Obviously the recent climb in commodity prices has weakened my argument considerably – constantly rising oil prices accompanied by increasing grain prices does tend to suggest something is amiss. Yet by far the biggest blow suffered by the ever-diminishing band of commodity contrarians came just a few weeks ago, with the release of Jeremy Grantham’s latest quarterly letter to investors entitled Time to Wake Up – it is a superb and passionately argued summary that suggests we are far from being in a commodity price bubble and this time “everything really is different”. Grantham’s conve...