Gold-hungry central banks. Copper miners buying back stock instead of digging new pits. A supply chain splitting along U.S.-China lines. Add it up, and Bob Minter thinks investors should stop asking whether a commodities boom is coming — and start asking whether they’re already in one.
Minter is director of ETF investment strategy at Aberdeen Investments, where he oversees the firm’s commodity and ETF approach. He’s covered commodities since 2012, when, as he put it, “literally no one else wanted to cover it. It was too boring.” Now they’re in the news “every day.”
The question: Is the world in a commodity supercycle (an unusually long, broad upswing driven by structural shifts in supply and demand)? Or is that narrative overstated?
Minter notes “supercycle” isn’t precise. But he points to a data series Aberdeen built stretching back to 1870 — producer price index divided by the S&P 500, with the S&P’s early history reconstruc
