The Essential Podcast, Episode 35: Building Blocks of the Real Economy — Thirty Years of the GSCI

About this Episode

Thirty years is an eternity in market terms, particularly if the market in question is the commodities market. Fiona Boal, Global Head of Commodities and Real Assets for S&P Dow Jones Indices, joins the Essential Podcast to talk about the 30th anniversary of the GSCI, supercycles, the energy transition, and the idiosyncratic nature of commodities markets in general.

The Essential Podcast from S&P Global is dedicated to sharing essential intelligence with those working in and affected by financial markets. Host Nathan Hunt focuses on those issues of immediate importance to global financial markets – macroeconomic trends, the credit cycle, climate risk, energy transition, and global trade – in interviews with subject matter experts from around the world.

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Show Notes

• Fiona Boal is Head of Commodities and Real Assets at S&P Dow Jones Indices (S&P DJI). She is responsible for the product management of the commodities, real asset, and housing price indices, including the S&P GSCI, Dow Jones Commodity Index (DJCI), S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, and S&P Real Assets Indices. These indices are leading measures of the commodities market, U.S. residential real estate prices, and composite real assets.

• After three decades of helping investors make more informed decisions and providing index-based access to diversification, liquidity, and inflation protection - what’s next for this index icon? Watch S&P Dow Jones Indices' latest Index TV video capturing the past, present, and future of commodities with the S&P GSCI in honor of the index's anniversary.

• When the S&P GSCI launched April 11, 1991, the S&P 500 closed at 380 and a barrel of crude oil was worth $21. Over the next 30 years, oil would peak near $146, the S&P 500 would cross 4,000, and the broad commodities market would respond to a rapidly changing world that saw the emergence of BRIC countries, the ebbs and flows of tensions in the Middle East, and a range of other geopolitical forces and natural events that caused sometimes-dramatic shifts in commodity supply and demand. Throughout it all, the S&P GSCI remained a steadfast measure of market changes. Made up of the most liquid commodity futures and world-production weighted, the S&P GSCI is a straightforward yet sophisticated measure of commodity beta. Since its inception, it has reliably served as a tool to improve diversification while also offering liquidity and the potential for inflation protection.