Roger Bade, mining analyst at London brokers Whitman Howard, has long argued that commodity markets are generally well supplied and will continue to be so.

Also, in his quarterly mining sector reviews, he has (for as far back as I can remember) doggedly stood by his pessimistic expectations for metal prices. They have remained well below the market consensus over many quarters and are (inevitably) well below what the market price has been.

Problem is, the market has been gradually moving nearer his numbers. The gaps are still substantial but, after what we have seen happen to the oil price, who can remain complacent about anything?

Bade’s argument is that the world is in a 1980s-1990s scenario of well supplied commodity markets and that the sector news flow will, in general, remain quite poor (ain’t that a fact?) with continued oversupply of commodities, poor prices, company cost-cutting, restructuring, write-downs and hence poor company financial results.

“The return of mining to the dead decades of the 1980s and 1990s has occurred and we have to adapt to recognise that only the highest quality companies and projects deserve support and will survive,” he writes this week.

Of course, many commentators have become pessimistic of late; the point here is that Bade has been saying exactly these same things for several years, long before most others changed their tune.

Just this week we have read predictions that the global copper industry will need to add the equivalent of a new Escondida mine every 15 months in order to meet global demand.

Yet according to the New York financial paper Barron’, “compounding copper’s woes is the expectation that there will be a surplus of copper this year as weaker demand meets growing supply. Given the interplay between supply and demand, it appears copper’s tough days could linger for a while”.

The small print of the recent copper story was that the upturn is not expected until 2018. Sure, miners have to plan several years ahead but a great deal could happen to the world economy over the next three years.

It is not just with copper that demand has not turned upwards. The great zinc rally, which last year was boosted as being imminent, still has failed to take off. Tin, as we all know, is heading for a massive (in terms of its market size) short supply by 2017 but the metal’s price still does quite badly, remaining under $US20,000/t.

Given his overall view, Bade believes investors will continue to shun the mining sector with its poor returns and will continue to concentrate on more consumer-oriented parts of the market. Incidentally, flight to tech has not proved the panacea: while some juniors doing the switchover have received a share price boost – African explorer turned video marketing platform Big Un (it used to be Republic Gold) has pulled out the basement – many others are still sub-1c in terms of their share values.

A few years ago I would quote Bade’s price outlooks as at the outer edge of plausibility, but perhaps we should given them a little more respect. He says these are not price targets, but rather “enthusiasm dampers”, where if projects do not offer superior economic forecasts at these prices, then Whitman Howard is not interested.

To keep Bade interested, your project will have to perform well at the following prices: $1000/oz for gold, $13/oz for silver, $5510/t for copper, $1322/t for lead, $13,225/t for nickel, $40/t in iron ore, $275/t for potash, thermal coal $70/t and $95/t when it comes to coking coal.

The interesting thing here is that Bade has actually reduced his “enthusiasm damper” thresholds in the past quarter; in the case of iron ore he had been previously been talking $40/t, while silver is down from $15/oz. He is considering cutting tin from $20,000/t to $15,000/t but is holding off until he sees whether the forecast demise of the world’s largest tin mine, San Rafael in Peru, does actually occur in 2017.

But the analyst is not out on a limb, as he explains: “Similar prices are used by leading banks, so projects will need to display robust returns at those prices in order to obtain debt finance”

It is a cold, hard world out there at present. And it looks unlikely to get any warmer. And how many projects in the pipeline will be able to meet these straitened commodity figures?