A top Goldman Sachs analyst says “we’re out of everything” and that commodities futures contracts trading are in backwardation at rates nots seen since 1997, reports an article in Bloomberg. Backwardation refers to a market model that denotes scarcity.
Jeff Currie of Goldman Sachs told Bloomberg TV that the entire world is in the middle of “a molecule crisis,” where near-term prices are better than future ones, even though they are in short supply. “We’re out of everything,” Currie says; according to data gathered by Bloomberg, 19 out of 28 raw materials—everything from oil, gas and other energy to grains—are in backwardation and futures curves are factoring in those shortages in numbers Currie says he hasn’t seen since the late 1990s.
The market for materials is red-hot, with the Bloomberg Commodity Spot Index soaring to new highs this year alone. Demand in the energy markets such as oil and gas has outstripped supply, and materials such as metals have seen their prices bolstered by supply shortages around the world—especially as the push for cleaner energy gets stronger.
That energy transition is will impact commodities for the long-term, other analysts say, and with capacity already running low, the potential risk to supply becomes greater, the article concludes.