Oil to Drop Below $100 as Funds Sell Commodities, Gartman Says (Betty Liu, Mike Munshi)

Sept. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Hedge fends, pensions funds and other speculators may have had ``enough of the commodity business'' and will sell assets, driving the price of oil to below $100 a barrel, economist Dennis Gartman said. 

"A lot of portfolio managers and pension funds that started owning commodities generally owned a lot of crude oil and they are finally saying, `You know what? This is not quite what it is cracked up to be,'" Gartman said in a Bloomberg Television interview in New York today. "The markets wants to go under $100, and I think it's going to go at least there."

Increasing global growth concerns coupled with a stronger dollar have driven commodity prices lower in the past two months, the longest slump since May 2007. The CRB index lost 5.9 percent in August after tumbling 10 percent in July. The Reuters/Jefferies Index of 19 raw materials has plunged 20 percent since reaching a record on July 3.

Investors are "just saying, `We've had enough of this commodity business. This is no fun. We were told this was an asset class, and it's proven not to be,'" said Gartman, editor of the Suffolk, Virginia-based Gartman Letter who correctly predicted in June that gold and other commodities would fall.

more

Read More: Bloomberg