His various references to grand unifying theories must be ironic, given his apparent inability to allow more than one aspect of an issue to co-exist with any other.
Otherwise it strikes a discordant note that someone claiming to be on a one-man search for a universal theory is completely impervious to the idea that other perspectives may be valid, or the simultaneous existence of partial truths. Here is a guy who will vehemently deny the existence of a cup handle, because he doesn't have a handle on the side he can see.
Maybe a fundamentalist religion would be a more satisfying pursuit, as far as rigid, singular and exclusive doctrine is concerned.
Anyway, already regreting the foregoing, the agriculture example falls down because all you need is 6 months and a bit of rain to re-supply a deficit market for most crops. For minerals you need about 7 years to ramp up production (depending) - once you have explored and found, etc. etc. so the analogy falls over straight away.
Although, the usual supply response still a cycle - it doesn't just keep going up forever.
Apart from under-spend leading into it, one of the other things driving this super-cycle is that the speed, endurance and the sheer scale of the demand requires a supply response much greater than ever before.
Comparative percentages concerning past cycles is one thing but sheer tonnage required this time is another.
And the charting of previous crashes - well yes there is a similarity in the visual representation of similar market events when you chart them afterwards. Is this a revelation of some kind? Can you tell us when the next event of this kind will occur - beforehand?
And yes, non-using speculators are inflating and distorting the market on the way up and will on the way back down, but isn't the whole world balanced on a mountain of deriviates worth a multiple of all the products from which they are derived?
Nonetheless, presumably the speculators see the effect of physical supply and that is why it is postulated that there is some "hidden" supply, apart from the less than transparent China position.
Also, supply tightness must still be the speculators' initial trigger - you can't just start paying huge sums for zinc out of the blue and expect all to follow - so this validates the relevance of the stockpile - or perhaps more accurately, the supply / demand balance it probably represents.
So, there is effectively a weight tied to to the price pendulum which exagerrates its swings and when it drops off they will revert, but not necessarily all the way and not necessarily all of a sudden, given the fundamental demand.
As for zinc price - anything could happen. The cycle will cause an eventual supply overshoot as it always has because of the cost and inflexibility of cranking it up in the first place.
However, the world being more complex than ever before and if demand just never stops growing, or even just doesn't decrease, given the sheer quantities being consumed, supply surplus may be moderated by events and sovereign risks and climate change and water shortages, etc. On the other hand, advances in materials science and nanotech may reduce demand sooner than we think - it will eventually.
(20min delay)