“We must not forget that housing is for living in, not for speculation. With this in mind, we will move faster to put in place a housing system that ensures supply through multiple sources, provides housing support through multiple channels, and encourages both housing purchase and renting. This will make us better placed to meet the housing needs of all of our people.”
– Excerpt from Xi Jinping’s speech at the 19th Communist Party of China National Congress
“Commodities tend to zig when the equity markets zag.” – Jim Rogers
“Let the market, not politicians, determine the flow of rice, oil and other commodities. Lower, more stable prices will ensue.” – Steve Hanke, Co-Director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise
“Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.” – Karl Marx
Industrial metals have had a great run starting in late 2015 and early 2016; equities of industrial metal producers even more so. Given this rally and the uncertainties around the Chinese investment-led growth model, one of the more difficult investment questions we have struggled with is: whether this bull market in industrial metals is sustainable or not? Our analysis seems to suggest that it is.
Commodity Research Bureau (CRB) US Spot Raw Industrial Index
Source: Commodity Research Bureau
We have a fairly straightforward framework to help us develop our initial opinion on the outlook for industrial metals. The framework is centred on Chinese money supply metrics, both M1 and M2, and essentially functions as a heuristic for capital spending in China. Chinese capital spending, as is widely accepted, has been the primary driver of demand for industrial commodities over the last two decades.
As a part of this framework we monitor the dynamic between two measures of money supply, M1 and M2. As M1 is a more narrowly defined measure of money supply consisting of the most liquid components – such as physical cash, checking accounts and demand deposits – of overall money supply, any increase in M1 relative to M2 is indicative of a move away from saving and toward investment. For example, companies that hoard cash tend to hold it in the form of time deposits and other financial assets, should the need to make capital investments arise, they would have to unwind these financial investments. This unwinding of financial investments into cash results in M1 increasing while M2 remains unchanged. To monitor this dynamic we simply calculate the ratio of M1 to M2. A higher number means M1 is increasing relative to M2 while a low number means M1 is declining relative to M2.
The ratio of M1 to M2 has been increasing since the end of 2015, indicating a higher propensity to invest than to save in China.
Ratio of China Money Supply M1 to China Money Supply M2
Source: The People’s Bank of China
While this ratio is informative during periods the ratio is trending, either upwards or downwards, it adds little value during periods it is stable, as witnessed between 1999 and 2007. In such periods, we rely, instead, on the year-on-year growth in M1. If M1 to M2 ratio is stable, then a growing M1 is indicative of an increase in the absolute level of investment in the economy. As a rule of thumb, growth in China’s M1 has tended to manifest itself in higher industrial commodity prices 4 to 8 months down the line.
Chinese M1 increased rapidly between the end of 2015 and early 2017 but has started to decline since. So while this signals a decline in the rate of growth in investment, the metric remains positive. This combined with a higher propensity to invest over saving, as indicated by the M1 to M2 ratio, suggests that the level of investment in China should remain healthy during the first half of 2018 and support continued demand for industrial commodities.
CRB US Spot Raw Industrial Index vs. China M1 YoY Growth (Lagged 6 Months)
Sources: The People’s Bank of China, Commodity Research Bureau
This framework has worked well as a timing tool for investing in industrial metals since the turn of the century. It may continue to work well, we suspect, as long as Chinese demand is the primary determinant of commodity prices. The limitation, however, is that the framework is purely Chinese demand centric and does not take into consideration substantial demand creation or destruction from other parts of the world; nor does it give weight to changing supply-side dynamics.
On the demand side, we think there are two key forces that will determine the trajectory of industrial commodities during 2018. The first is construction activity in China, ergo housing demand. While the second is the incentives within US tax bill for corporations to increase capital investment in the near term.
Xi Jinping in his speech at the Communist Party of China’s 19th National Congress addressed the need to “put in place a housing system that ensures supply through multiple sources”. To our mind this is as much to do with affordability as it is to do with the supply of housing, which is why Xi specifically mentioned encouraging renting as part of the solution.
Earlier in the year, the Chinese government announced that it will allow, on a trial basis, the development of rental housing projects on rural land – the trial will be conducted in 13 cities including Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. According to data from Centaline Property, 10 cities have already allocated land for rental housing construction. Chief amongst them is Beijing, where authorities expect to supply 6,000 hectares of land for residential housing by 2021, almost a third of which will be for rental housing. Beijing has even gone as far as announcing a new rental housing policy, which guarantees the same education rights to the children of the tenants of rental properties as the rights afforded to the children of property owner. The new policy even enables tenants renting government-subsidized housing to have their household registration (“hukou”) on their rented homes.
The government is clearly very serious about developing the rental housing market. And key private sector participants are responding to the government’s signals. Not long after the National Congress, China Construction Bank – one of the big four banks in China – launched a loan product for home renters. China Vanke, a leading residential real estate developer in China, indicated that it aims to provide up to 100,000 apartments for long-term leases, up from the 24,000 rental units operated currently. AliPay, Alibaba’ mobile payment platform, announced that it would enable users across eight cities and based on their credit history to rent residential properties through the platform without having to pay deposits.
The Chinese government’s objective is to make housing more affordable. House prices in major cities have become exorbitantly high and this is a factor contributing to the dampening in the rate of Chinese urbanisation. If the government’s goal of transforming the Chinese economy into a consumption-led, as opposed to investment-led, economy is to be achieved, urbanisation needs to continue unabated for many more years. Simply because urban consumers clearly outspend rural consumers – after all, the Joneses do not live in rural China.
Despite the willingness shown by some of the large private sector developers at the early stage – it is not too difficult to nudge companies dependent on government largesse – the challenge for the government will be to create a system in which property developers are able to offload inventory to recoup their investment shortly after delivery, as opposed to collecting rents over many years. Solutions to this problem can involve mobilising capital from pension funds and other institutional investors into rental properties, developing capital market infrastructure to increase the number of real estate investment vehicles such as real estate investment trusts or other forms of securitisation, or simply facilitating increased investment by international real estate income funds into China.
Notwithstanding the challenges, the key point for us is that the Chinese government has a goal that ultimately creates an additional source of demand for housing and thus construction. This incremental demand can only be bullish for the demand for industrial metals.
The incentives for US capital investment created by the potential tax reform maybe somewhat more subtle than the overtures of the Chinese government but might ultimately prove to be as bullish, if not more, for industrial commodities. The key provisions in the tax bill in this regard are the:
- Corporate income tax rate being cut from 35 per cent to 21 per cent, effective 1 January, 2018
- Capital expensing provision that permits businesses to completely write-off, or expense, the entire value of investments in plant and equipment for five years. Starting the sixth year, this provision is gradually eliminated over a five year period
Cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 per cent is bound to increase investment into the US. On top of that, the capital expensing provision within the proposal incentivises both new capital that comes into the US as well as existing capital to be put into plant and equipment. At a time where companies are struggling to recruit adequately trained staff and productivity growth is non-existent, the capital expense provision is likely to result in a substantial increase in the demand for capital goods — and for industrial commodities.
Coming to supply, China’s supply side reforms are well documented – capacities at coal mines have been curtailed, steel mills have been shuttered and the supply of natural gas rationed. The results thus far have been largely positive.
Investment Perspective
Deflationary forces reward businesses that delay investment and maintain low levels of inventory. The lack of capital investment and the absence of excess levels of inventory, in turn reduces the risk of impairment, write-down or liquidation. Without write-downs or liquidation, the business cycle continues, albeit unimpressively. This has been the case since the Global Financial Crisis and especially after commodities peaked in 2011/12.
What if given the supply and demand dynamics, however, we are at the early stages of an industrial commodities bull market? What if the depleted inventory levels combined with reduced production capacities leads to a feeding frenzy whereby rising prices result in rising demand? The latter is the very dynamic witnessed in the semiconductors market this year. And we certainly see it is a plausible, albeit low probability, scenario for industrial metals for 2018.
We are of the opinion, barring short-term volatility, the risk for industrial metals remains to the upside.
We are long Vale SA ($VALE) and United States Steel Corporation ($X). We will be looking to add other names and direct commodity plays on any meaningful pullbacks.
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This post should not be considered as investment advice or a recommendation to purchase any particular security, strategy or investment product. References to specific securities and issuers are not intended to be, and should not be interpreted as, recommendations to purchase or sell such securities. Information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, but not guaranteed.