![ore pit](https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/ore-pit.jpg)
Grim and Growing Darker
A friend in funds management in Sydney sent me an email last weekend which said in part that special interest groups “will not be receiving government funding for much longer. The outlook for the Australian economy is nothing short of frightening. We have utterly squandered a one-in-a-hundred year economic boom.”
Yes, a lot of people are now running around saying that the sky is falling, but how far could it fall? Let’s have a look at iron ore. The chart following shows Australian iron exports and prices from 1969 with a projection to 2020. The prices are in 2015 constant Australian dollars. Iron ore volumes are the blue line and prices are the green line:
Iron ore exports took off in the 1960s with the Japanese steel boom then hit a brick wall with the first oil price shock of 1973. There was a 14% volume decline from 1974 to 1981. The iron ore price entered a gentle long term decline from the early 1970s, losing about 30% of its value and bottoming out in the…
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