SPECULATIONS:
Craig, thanks for starting this thread. I know next to nothing about commodities, and I am finding it very educational.
However, in the spirit of contribution, here are some speculations, some of which may have some bearing on commodities. No doubt they will also reveal my near-total ignorance of the subject:
-- the tech stock "malaise" will prove much deeper and more traumatic than anybody wants to think, and quite a few players fall by the wayside
-- the mainline telco players, thinking that their hardwired connection to customers is the secure basis of their ongoing monopoly will (in many cases) fail to adapt quickly enough. New technologies like Free Space Optics will have devastating effects, particularly for office buildings, apartments and the like
-- the technology players focused on the Metro space will do very well in bringing massive bandwidth to the home and office alike
-- somebody (not MSFT) will invent the home operating system, which will incorporate PRIVACY, meter reading, tv on demand, video on demand, video conferencing with your friends, digital camera pix sharing, voice e-mail, telephone, etc. They will license it (for local language use) to national distributors, who in turn will license the application interface information to local software developers who will SELL additional software that will fit
into the overall format. It will probably be freeware, based on Linux. People will be amazed at how quickly it spreads. It will be designed to receive (and integrate)
downloaded music and video into home collections, charging
incredibly modest royalty costs to the user's credit card, and automatically paying royalties to the artists and their promotional companies (not necessarily existing record companies)
-- the environmental movement will start to get its act together by convincing the population that:
1) without clean air they die (via various pollution caused illnesses--one example of which are many kinds of cancers)
2) without clean water they die
3) without clean, revivable soil they just grow garbage
produce that might look good but has lousy food value
4) without dealing with waste and sewage disposal altogether they just poison everything around (including themselves). And of course they are EATING what is generally around
5) people learn that feeding diseased animal carcasses
turned into food additives for livestock produces mad cow disease and the like. They start to question, just a little bit whether if they ate the bodies of the animals fed such stuff whether it might perhaps have the same effect on them.....?
-- There is much more interest in CLEAN energy, as a basic requisite, on the grounds that if you factor in the costs of the cleanup that has to follow DIRTY energy, dirty energy is not cheap, it's only cheap if somebody else pays for the dirtiness
-- there is much more interest in extracting every possible energy benefit from the sun on the grounds that it is rather widely available, free, etc. Much headway will be made in this.
-- Tesla's "electrical transmission" experiments will be made to work and will have profound effect
-- There will be much more interest in the cost-effective
conversion of energy, such as electric to heat, electric to cooling, more efficient motors, the use of the by-products of energy conversion and so on
-- All kinds of other technologies will start to be employed seriously like fog to moisture catching to water supplies; mini power installations for rivers that don't destroy the fish, and so on
-- It will be commonplace for almost everybody to gather
and store the rain that falls on their property during the
rainy season (if such exists), and having it available for
use during the non-rainy season
-- Much more development and innovation in the areas of
the STORAGE of energy
-- Labor intensive factory-type work moves even more into
2nd and 3rd world countries, and "world" labor rates slowly but steadily rise
-- Companies more and more outsource manufacturing, realizing that for their business their core-functions are
INNOVATION and MARKETING
-- Supplying the consumer economies worldwide with healthy food, clothing, education, distraction, financial services,
community resources and the like will be the cornerstone of all world economies. The commodities needed to support this will be the dominant ones.
-- The transition from THE ECONOMIES OF WAR to the ECONOMIES OF PEACE will continue. The equation given by the Spiritual Master, Adi Da of "Cooperation + Tolerance = Peace" will slowly but steadily be put into practice.
-- Some noted economists will produce some studies that show that more profits can be made in peace than in war. Since humans are oriented to the "trinity" of lust, greed and anger, perhaps people will decide the less time we have for anger and destruction, the more time we will have for greed and lust!
-- There will be pooling of destructive war-making assets on the grounds that they are too expensive to be afforded by all but the largest countries. Time-sharing concepts could also be applied. You can have a war, providing you do it within your time-slice. Otherwise you will have to wait till next time. (this is not a serious suggestion, I might add)
-- A big boom in biodegradable agricultural chemicals, concurrent with the massive growth of organic farming. Then a decline in biodegradable agricultural chemicals as farmers realize why they can't make any money is because they are giving all their profits to somebody else.
-- Farmers outsource the mechanized planting and harvesting to coperatively owned enterprises which move north with the spring planting and south with the fall harvesting. Farm equipment bought by the farmer himself will be far more versatile even then at present, and far cheaper to operate.
-- the electric or hybrid car will come into its own. Fuel cell technology will invade many segments far removed from what was the original concept
So in this very changed situation some commodity markets will prosper. Primarily those will be the ones that directly and indirectly support the consumer markets.
Business travel should diminish a LOT as advanced teleconferencing because utterly commonplace and commodity-priced.
Well anyway, Craig, that's enough for now in the realm of
speculation.
Namaste!
Jim |
