Commodity Supercycles

The decade long booms and busts that sweep real commodity prices together.

Overview

Analysts identify supercycles back to the 1890s US industrialization, postwar reconstruction, and the 2000s China surge, each pairing a demand shock, urbanizing hundreds of millions of people, with supply that answers only after years of capital spending, amplifying the boom and then glutting the market. Real prices mean revert over decades, and cycles lift everything together, oil with copper with grain and farmland, since infrastructure absorbs everything at once. The China cycle peaked in 2011, and the 2020s electrification demand for copper, lithium, and grid metals has strategists arguing whether a green supercycle began against Chinese property drag. Timing it is a fools errand, but the phase, shortage rents or supply flood, frames allocation.