1/5

I wonder if they've thought through the systemic implications. Given China's disproportionate share of demand (50% or more of global production of major industrial metals, for example), to predict a new supercycle of rising commodity prices... https://www.ft.com/content/d3c43942-af5c-45df-8797-aed080a61092
2/5

is effectively the same as predicting that China will run another decade or two of 4-6% GDP growth, driven mainly by surging infrastructure and real-estate investment. This in turn implies that China's debt-to-GDP ratio will rise from 280% today to at least 400-450%.
3/5

This strikes me as pretty unlikely. For those who might argue that "all it would take" is for India to begin to replicate China's growth story of the past four decades, it would take at least 15-20 years of replicating China before India were big enough to...
4/5

matter to anywhere near the same extent.

We could of course get a temporary rise in hard-commodity prices as US infrastructure spending kicks in (although this year I expect Chinese hard-commodity consumption to drop temporarily) , but most of the variation in demand...
5/5

depends ultimately on what happens in China, and of course the more hard commodity prices rise because of non-Chinese factors, the harder it will be – and the faster debt must rise – to maintain the needed Chinese growth rate.
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