A derivative of the same trade is to short the currency of Australia, a big raw-materials supplier to China.Other hedge funds are placing even more oblique bets.
"One of the big raw materials is great entrepreneurship," he says, and that to transform a highly regulated market you need people who can really shake things up.
And some other developed countries are growing faster than the United States Canadaa, which didn't have a banking crisis to begin with; Australia, a big exporter of raw materials that benefited greatly from China's growth; the oil exporter Norway.
A big increase in interest costs is the equivalent of a big increase in raw material costs for a manufacturing company.
On a bigger scale again, a battle for raw materials, economic resources, political influence and military footholds is under way in sub-Saharan Africa, where China has placed commercial advantage ahead of governance and human rights concerns, and increasingly in Latin America.
So there is a logic to making it in Nigeria, a big market with the raw materials at hand.
Rear-projection designs have an inherent cost advantage over the flat-panel displays because they use optics (lamps, lenses and space) to create a big image rather than raw materials.
Mr. Kiefer's career-making move was to draw an analogy between two big ideas: transforming raw materials into art and transforming the raw history of Germany into a mythology of redemption and rebirth.
On the other hand, there is the story of China as the biggest buyer of raw materials on a worldwide scale, a resources-poor nation bent on headlong expansion which needs to be fuelled by supply from Africa, the Middle East, Australia, Latin America and neighbours such as Burma.
"We come from Canada, a big cold country that exports raw materials to a southern neighbor," he said.
The East Asian countries are big importers of raw materials, so the slump in their economies has pushed down the prices of oil and other commodities such as metals and timber.
