Why commodity prices are down in US but up in Europe
High rates also decrease firms’ desire to carry inventories. Think of oil held in tanks.
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High rates also decrease firms’ desire to carry inventories. Think of oil held in tanks.
Jeffrey Frankel
31 December 2014
Oil prices plummeted 43 per cent during the course of 2014 - good news for oil-importing countries, but bad news for Russia, Nigeria, Venezuela and other oil exporters. Some attribute the price drop to the US shale-energy boom. Others cite Opec’s (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) failure to agree on supply restrictions.
But that is not the whole story. The price of iron ore is down, too. So are gold, silver, and platinum prices. And the same is true for sugar, cotton and soya bean prices. In fact, most dollar commodity prices have fallen since the beginning of the year. Though a host of sector-specific factors affect the price of each commodity, the fact that the downswing is so broadly shared - as is often the case with big price swings - suggests that macroeconomic factors are at work.
FACTORS DRIVING THE PRICES DOWN
So, what macroeconomic factors could be driving down commodity prices? Perhaps it is deflation. But, though inflation is very low - even negative in a few countries - something more must be going on because commodity prices are falling relative to the overall price level. In other words, real commodity prices are falling.
The most common explanation is the global economic slowdown, which has diminished demand for energy, minerals and agricultural products. Indeed, growth has slowed and GDP (Gross Domestic Product) forecasts have been revised downwards in most countries.
But the US is a major exception. The American expansion seems increasingly well established, with estimated annual growth even exceeding 4 per cent over the last two quarters. Private employment has risen by more than 200,000 for each of the last 10 consecutive months. And, yet, it is particularly in the US that commodity prices have been falling. The Economist’s euro-denominated Commodity Price Index, for example, has actually risen by 4 per cent over the 12 months; it is only the Index in terms of dollars - which is what gets all the attention - that is down 6 per cent.
That brings us to monetary policy, the importance of which as a determinant of commodity prices is often forgotten. Monetary tightening is widely anticipated in the US, with the Federal Reserve having ended quantitative easing in October and likely to raise short-term interest rates sometime in the coming year.
This recalls a familiar historical pattern: falling real (inflation-adjusted) interest rates in the 1970s, 2002-04, and 2007-08 were accompanied by rising real commodity prices; and sharp increases in US real interest rates in the 1980s sent dollar commodity prices tumbling.
There is something intuitive about the idea that when the Fed “prints money”, the money flows into commodities, among other places, and so bids their prices up. But, what, exactly, is the causal mechanism?
MONETARY POLICY AND COMMODITY PRICES
In fact, there are four channels through which monetary policy affects real commodity prices, via the real interest rate (aside from whatever effect it has via the level of economic activity).
First, the extraction channel. High interest rates reduce the price of non-renewable resources by increasing the incentive for extraction today rather than tomorrow, thereby boosting the pace at which oil is pumped, gold mined, or forests logged.
Second is the inventory channel. High rates also decrease firms’ desire to carry inventories. Think of oil held in tanks.
Third, the financialisation channel. Portfolio managers respond to a rise in interest rates by shifting into treasury bills and out of commodity contracts - which are now an “asset class”.
Finally, the exchange rate channel. High real interest rates strengthen the domestic currency, thereby reducing the price of internationally traded commodities in domestic terms - even if the price has not fallen in foreign-currency terms.
The fourth of the channels, the exchange rate, has already been functioning. The end of quantitative easing in the US has coincided with moves by the ECB and the Bank of Japan in the opposite direction - towards enhanced monetary stimulus through their own versions of QE. The result has been an appreciation of the dollar against the euro and the yen. The euro is down 10 per cent against the dollar over the last year and the yen is down 13 per cent. That explains how so many commodity prices can be down in terms of dollars and yet up in terms of other currencies at the same time.
The writer is professor of economics at the Harvard Kennedy School. This article was sourced from VoxEU.org, a Web portal which features the views of prominent economists