Despite recent fall, oil prices will touch $100 per barrel again

light-diesel-oil-250x250Vivek Kaul

This column should complete the trilogy of columns on the price of crude oil. In yesterday’s column I had argued that it is difficult to predict which way the price of oil would go in the short-term, even though it seems that it will continue to remain low.
The more important question is which way the price of crude oil will go in the long term. While exact forecasting is risky business, the direction of the price rise can be predicted especially when structural factors are at work.
Nevertheless, before we get around to doing that, we first need to understand why is oil so important for the progress of human civilization. As Jeremy Grantham of GMO puts it in a newsletter titled
The Beginning of the End of the Fossil Fuel Revolution (From Golden Goose to Cooked Goose: “The quality of modern life owes almost everything to the existence of fossil fuels, a massive store of dense energy that for 200 years had become steadily cheaper as a fraction of income. Under that stimulus, the global economy grew ever larger.”
By fossil fuels Grantham means coal and oil. But what is it that makes oil so important? Grantham explains it through an example of one of his sons who is a forester. Grantham talks about a situation where wood is needed for heating purposes and hence, trees need to be cut. This can be done by hiring local labour who will use their axes to cut trees, and paying them a respectable minimum wage of $15 an hour. The other option is to fill a chainsaw with a gallon of gas and use that to cut trees.
As Grantham writes: “One of my sons, a forester, tells me he could cut all day, 8 to 12 hours, with a single gallon of gasoline and be at least 20 times faster than strong men with axes and saws, or a total of 160 to 240 man hours of labor. For one gallon!”
If people had to be hired to do the same job around $2,400 (160 x $15) to $3600 (240 x $15) would have to be paid. That’s the value created by one gallon(or 3.79 litres) of gasoline(or what we call petrol in India) which costs around $3 in the United States.
This “surplus value” created by gasoline and other petroleum products were a major reason which helped usher in the industrial revolution in the Western world. Before the world discovered fossil fuels it was totally dependent on wood from trees for its energy requirements.
As Grantham writes in another newsletter titled
Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever: “[Wood]…was necessary for producing the charcoal used in making steel, which in turn was critical to improving machinery – a key to progress. (It is now estimated that all of China’s wood production could not even produce 5% of its current steel output!) The wealth of Holland and Britain in particular depended on wooden sailing ships with tall, straight masts to the extent that access to suitable wood was a major item in foreign policy and foreign wars. Even more important, wood was also pretty much the sole producer of energy in Western Europe.”
Other than being used for making charcoal, wood was also used to power steam engines and for heating purposes. What this meant was that forests were rapidly cut down for wood which was required to produce energy. “Not surprisingly, a growing population and growing wealth put intolerable strains on the natural forests, which were quickly disappearing in Western Europe, especially in England, and had already been decimated in North Africa and the Near East. Wood availability was probably the most limiting factor on economic growth,” writes Grantham.
If the world had not discovered first coal and then oil, it would have run out of trees by around 1850, estimates Graham. And there would have been other impacts as well. “By 1900 wars would have been fought over forests, and the population – without oil-intensive agriculture, both for growing and transportation – would have peaked out probably well under two billion and our species would indeed have had its nose pushed up against the limits of food,” writes Grantham.
That is the importance that fossil fuels, in particular oil, have had on the human civilization over the last two hundred years. So, it is important that the world continues to have access to “cheap” oil. But will that be case?
As Niels C. Jensen writes in
The Absolute Return Letter for January 2015 titled Pie in the Sky: “The world will still run out of cheap oil (cheap as in approx. $25 per barrel of production cost, as is currently the average production cost in the Middle East) over the next decade or so. It is hard to predict exactly when, because OPEC members are not the most informative people in the world.”
This, despite the fact that over the last six to seven years the world has managed to increase the production of shale oil. In the United States oil production has gone up by 4 million barrels per day to 9 million barrels per day and almost all of it has come through shale oil production.
Even with this, the future does not look very encouraging. And there is a reason for the same. As James K. Galbraith writes in
The End of Normal: “There is no doubt that shale is having a strong effect on the American economic picture at present…But the outlook for sustained shale…production over a long time horizon remains uncertain, for a simple reason: the wells have not existed long enough for us to know with confidence how long they will last. We don’t know that they won’t; but also we don’t know that they will. Time will tell, but there is the unpleasant possibility that when it does, the shale gas miracle will end.”
Grantham goes into detail about the point that Galbraith makes. The process used to drill out shale oil is referred to as fracking. As Grantham points out: “The first two years of flow are basically all we get in fracking…Because fracking reserves basically run off in two years and can be exploited very quickly indeed by the enterprising U.S. industry, such reserves could be viewed as much closer to oil storage reserves than a good, traditional field that flows for 30 to 60 years.”
Hence, shale oil will be what Jensen calls a “relatively short-lived phenomenon”. It is not replacing cheap traditional oil which is becoming more and more difficult to find. “Last year for example, despite spending nearly $700 billion globally – up from $250 billion in 2005 – the oil industry found just 4½ months’ worth of current oil production levels, a 50-year low!,” writes Grantham.
Hence the oil industry in the “last 12 months” has replaced “only 4½ months’ worth of current production!” This, despite the boom in shale oil production.
What this clearly tells us is that the recent fall in the price of oil is at best a temporary phenomenon. Over the long term, oil prices can only go up. As Jensen puts it: “we will see the oil price at $100 again, and it won’t take many years, but it could be an extraordinarily bumpy ride.”
Meanwhile,watch this space.

The column originally appeared on www.equitymaster.com as a part of The Daily Reckoning on Jan 14, 2015

Why the Modi bull market is likely to continue

narendra_modiVivek Kaul  
If foreign investors into the Indian stock market are to be believed, India is currently in the midst of a Modi rally. Goldman Sachs had explained this phenomenon best in a note titled Modi-fying our view, published on November 5, 2013. “The BJP led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) could prevail in the next parliamentary elections that are due by May 2014. Equity investors tend to view the BJP as business-friendly, and the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi (the current chief minister of Gujarat) as an agent of change. Current polls show Mr.Modi and the BJP as faring well in the five upcoming state elections, which are considered lead indicators for the general election next year. Even though the actual general election outcome is uncertain, the market could trade this favorably over the next 2 quarters, which argues for modifying our stance,” the Goldman Sachs note pointed out.
Every bull market has a theory behind it. But ultimately any market goes up when the amount of money being brought in by the buyers is more than the amount of money being taken out by the sellers. For the Indian stock market to continue going up, and for the so called “Modi” rally to continue, the foreign investors need to continue bringing in money into the country.
The foreign institutional investors have made a net investment of Rs 72,791 crore since the beginning of the year. During the same period the domestic institutional investors have net sold Rs 65,694 crore.
In fact, numbers for the month of November make for a very interesting read. The foreign institutional investors during the month have made a net investment of Rs 6108 crore. During the same period the domestic institutional investors have net sold stocks worth Rs 9376 crore.
Through this data we can conclude that foreign investors have been more bullish on Indian stocks than Indian investors. Why has that been the case?
A possible interpretation of this is that the domestic institutional investors are worried about the overall state of the Indian economy. The Goldman Sachs summarises these challenges well as “the macro challenges that India faces in terms of external and fiscal imbalances, high inflation and tight monetary policy.” And given this, they have been net sellers during the course of this year.
The foreign investors are not bothered about the state of the Indian economy and that is why they have been buying Indian stocks. Why is that? A possible explanation is the fact that they have access to all the “easy money” in the world at very low interest rates.
They have been borrowing and investing this money in the Indian as well as other stock markets all over the world. This has been possible because of all the money being printed by the Western central banks. This has led to a situation where there is enough money floating around in the financial system and hence, kept interest rates low.
So for the foreign investors to continue investing money in India, it is important that interest rates in the Western world continue to remain low. For that to happen the Western central banks need to continue printing money. And that is the most important condition for the so called “Modi” rally to continue.
In case of the United States, which has been printing $85 billion every month, the decision to continue the easy money policy rests primarily in the hands of Janet Yellen, who is currently the Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve of United States, the American central bank, and will take over as its next chairperson early next year.
So will she continue printing money? Jeremy Grantham, the chief investment strategist of GMO, and one of the most acclaimed hedge fund managers in the world, believes that Yellen will continue to print money, and follow her predecessors Ben Bernane and Alan Greenspan, and ensure that the Federal Reserve continues to run an easy money policy in the process.
As Grantham puts it in 
Ignoble Prizes and Appointmentshis most recent quarterly newsletter “My personal view is that the Greenspan-Bernanke regime of excessive stimulus, now administered by Yellen, will proceed as usual, and that the path of least resistance, for the market will be up.”
And this will mean stock market rallies not only in the United States but all over the world, including in emerging markets like India. “My personal guess is that the U.S. market, especially the non-blue chips, will work its way higher, perhaps by 20% to 30% in the next year or, more likely, two years, with the rest of the world including emerging market equities covering even more ground in at least a partial catch-up,” writes Grantham.
What is interesting is that another veteran of the US markets and one of its foremost investment newsletter writers Richard Russel has had something similar to say in the recent past. Russel in a recent note titled 
Get Ready for the Mania Phase explained that there are three phases to any bull market. In the first phase the wise and seasoned investors enter the market and pick up stocks which are going dirt cheap, because of the previous bear market.
In the second phase, which happens to be the longest and the most deceptive phase, retail investors flirt with stocks and buy them very carefully and not on a regular basis. In the third and final phase of the bull market investors really take to stocks. As Russel writes “The third or speculative phase of a bull market is characterized by a wild and wooly and ever-increasing entrance by the retail public. This phase is characterized by hot tips, hype and pure greed.”
This third and final phase of the bull market has started in the United States, feels Russel. “This is where I think we are now in this bull market. I believe that during the next 12 months we will experience a surprising and ever-expanding rush by the “mom and pop” public to enter the market. At the same time, veteran investors and institutions will seize the opportunity to distribute stock that they may have held for years,” he writes.
And this phenomenon along with the easy money policy of the Federal Reserve will lead to a global rally in stocks. As Russel puts it “All primary movements are international in scope, and this bull market will be no exception.”
The trouble of course is that this rally will not be based on any fundamentals, but just a lot of easy money chasing stocks. And that is something that cannot last beyond a while. The bubble will burst and there will be a lot of pain. As Grantham puts it “And then we will have the third in the series of serious market busts since 1999 and presumably Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen, et al. will rest happy, for surely they must expect something like this outcome given their experience. And we the people, of course, will get what we deserve.”
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on November 30, 2013
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)