Director of Zacks Equity Research
Dirk van Dijk, CFA has long considered the affects of sky-high energy prices for an extended period of time on the overall global economy. Today we have him spell out a couple scenarios that may be plausible in the months and years ahead.
What do you foresee if oil prices remain at high levels?
Well, the downside could be massive wars over resources and a major collapse of the world economy. However, let’s focus on a more middle of the road case, one where in real terms the price of oil remains where it is today.
For the most part, these are changes that will occur due to market forces, with relatively little need for changes in public policy. Stable real prices for oil would imply ongoing demand destruction in the OECD [Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development] countries combined with some slowdown in the growth of consumption in the emerging economies. The magnitude and the shape of the demand response to changes in price differs greatly if the change is seen as permanent, or just a temporary spike. So far most of the responses we have seen to higher oil prices seem to reflect the view that high prices are just an aberration.
What sorts of changes would we expect to see, say a decade from now?
Well first and foremost would be the “great slowdown.” We will probably see the return of the dreaded “double nickel” speed limit. However, more significant than this would be a slowdown in freight shipments, most notably by changing the mode of transportation, not the slowing of each mode.
As a general rule of thumb, each mode shift results in a five-fold improvement in energy efficiency. Fewer goods would move by air freight, particularly if there was no ocean to cross. This will mean that firms like FedEx (FDX) and UPS (UPS) should be considered like the airlines are today, firms you only rent for a tactical trade, not as something you seriously consider investing in for the long term.
Those goods would be shifted to the next slowest mode of transportation, trucking. A large percentage of the goods that are now carried by trucks would be shifted to rail. Truckers who concentrate on full truckload cargos would be at more risk than those that do a large amount of less-than-truckload business.
Since most of the population lives near the coast or on a navigable waterway, we may see a return of inter-coastal shipping. The amount of energy conserved by each class of shipping taking one step slower would be enormous. To pull this off would require quite a bit of investment in infrastructure, in particular refurbishing (or creating) ports and upgrading the carrying capacity of the rail system.
Firms that made rail cars would benefit while makers of big class eight trucks will suffer. Where rail was used, it would be primarily for the long haul, with trucks still used to go the last 50 or 100 miles. This would mean that businesses would have to keep larger inventories on hand, since they could not count on the part to be there exactly when they needed it anymore (not to mention the greater amount of inventories in transit).
Warehouses could make a comeback. This will result in a need for more working capital, and will reduce returns on assets, but hardly to a crippling degree.
Some things we have grown used to have become simply unavailable, but they are not particularly critical to the running of the world economy. For example, it is no longer feasible to fly cut flowers from the southern hemisphere to the U.S. in the middle of winter. Valentines Day will be much more expensive. There will be less fresh fruit available off-season. Given the energy-intensive nature of modern agriculture, food prices in general will be higher than we have been used to over the last several decades.
It sounds as if many things we’ve taken for granted, like air travel, would be considered luxuries.
In terms of personal transportation, air travel has once again become more of a luxury good. It is still widely available, but there are fewer flights, they are more crowded and it is significantly more expensive. Business travel is down as more firms use teleconferencing for routine meetings, although if it is important enough, businessmen still travel. Up until this point, telecommuting has largely been a question of lifestyle (i.e. more time with the kids), and sort of considered a perk by most firms. Look for a much larger percentage of workers to be doing so from home.
Elsewhere, with broadband Internet connections, there is little real need for most office workers to actually be in the office. This trend will not be good for commercial real estate. With more people working from home the demand for office space will fall, and with it office rents.
It also implies that major hardware suppliers for the Internet, firms like Cisco (CSCO), will continue to be well positioned. Working from home will be particularly attractive to those people who live in the exurbs. Telecommuters may be the only people who can afford to live in communities 40 miles from an urban center with no good public transportation. Housing prices will recover much more quickly in the cities and the inner ring of suburbs than in the outer suburbs. Many McMansions built in those communities may never sell for the prices they went for when first built a year or two ago.
Do you see this affecting the auto industry in any profound ways?
Cars are still in use, but by this time the remaining auto firms have shifted most of their production to smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. Plug-in hybrids have picked up a significant – but still far from dominant – share of the new car market, but are still about as common as a Prius is on the road today. Large SUVs and pickup trucks have become niche vehicles largely used for commercial (or agricultural) reasons. This mix shift, while very bad for profitability, will certainly help the auto firms meet the new CAFÉ standards.
People will consider it normal to rent a truck for those occasions that they need to tow something. Taking public transportation to work is no longer frowned upon (never really the case in a few large urban areas, such as New York and Chicago, but very much the case today in many areas). Ethanol has become a major source of liquid fuels, although most of the production is derived either from cellulosic sources like switch grass or wood chips, or from algae.
Are electric cars a major consideration?
The ongoing shift towards plug-in hybrids increases the importance of electricity in the overall energy mix. If the Chevy Volt can be produced in a large enough quantity soon enough, it might be the savior of GM (GM)).
How about other forms of alternative energy?
Wind has become a major energy source with a band of wind farms running up the Western Great Plains. The manufacture of wind turbines is one of General Electric’s (GE) biggest business units, both for domestic use and for export.
Hopefully by that time, the engineering challenge of how to deal with radioactive waste will have been solved, and a large number (say 30 to 40) nuke power plants are either under construction or have come on line. However, if that challenge cannot be solved, it seems foolhardy to be creating and storing large amounts of waste above ground in a post-9/11 world. We will probably have to relax the standards for the length of time the material has to be absolutely safe, from the current 100,000 years to something a bit more manageable, but still very long term, say 10,000 years (which going back rather than forward reaches beyond even the earliest villages on Earth).
Dirk van Dijk, CFA is the Director of Zacks Equity Research.
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