For those of us who are always tempted to believe that we see a commodity supercycle developing, there was a good opinion piece in Bloomberg recently that reminds us just how much the last couple cycles have depended on China’s explosive growth, particularly in steel but really in all commodities… and how little “super” is coming from that country right this moment.

“It was an astonishing bonanza: From the late 1990s to earlier this year, iron ore prices jumped nearly tenfold, more than any other major commodity; traded volume tripled; Australian commodity tycoons become billionaires; mining companies turned, even briefly, into Wall Street darlings; and mighty legal battles broke for control of the last untapped mineral deposits.

“And now, it’s over: The greatest commodity boom thus far of the 21st century has ended. China inflated it — and China, too, is bringing it down.”

I remain tempted by leading steelmaker ArcelorMittal (MT), the Bob Robotti pick I’ve been watching for a while, but the cyclicality of the steelmaking industry is almost as crazy as the iron ore price, which has kept me cautiously on the sidelines. I just don’t understand the business well enough yet… but I’m still learning.

And the same dynamic is arguably true for most of the base metal commodities, and even for oil — base metal prices (copper, nickel, iron ore, etc.) are so much more about China than about anything else… though with copper, which I think remains the highest consensus “there’s gonna be a long-term bull market” metal, there is, at least, a real shortage of new mine production (unlike iron ore), and there’s meaningful demand from the push to electrify the world outside of China.  So I’m holding out hope that copper eventually returns to prices that will incentivize real work at building supply (that’s at least well over $5, the Altius Minerals folks think it’s over $10), but, again, almost every metal has a long-term chart that shows a dramatic change in the late 1990s through about 2007, reaching a never-before-seen plateau in pricing, and that’s overwhelmingly the signal that China changed everything.  Copper probably needs real global economic growth in order to see booming prices that outpace inflation, too, not just the push to gradually electrify more of our energy usage. There are other emerging economies that are industrializing and building out their electric grid, and certainly there’s a huge ...