Jan - May 2008 vs Jan - Dec 2006 prices available here:
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/I...s/Pnk_0608.pdf)
I can only count a few commodities that are "down" globally in the last three years -> fishmeal, domestic US sugar, global sugar, and zinc are the only commodities with prices are down in the last three years... out of 72 commodities listed only 4 have downward trends in the past three years.
It would be interesting to see some longer term trends on those same commodities.
On all of the indicators, Agriculture, food, fats and oils, grains, and fertilizers have had greater gains in price, and most others have had similar gains to oil's, all of them in double digits.
I can't believe that people are not also talking about natural gas being over $10/MMBtu again around these parts especially.
It is crazy, but there seems to be a lot of different sources being discovered or announced these days - Offshore Brazil, Bakken Oil, Shaunavon Oil, Horn River type shale gas plays, Russia as a whole, the arctic land grab, not to mention manufactured sources of petroleum type fuels and the seeming slow boil of alternative energy usage...
When are we going to have a true revolution in other things such as lifestyle, power transmission, transportation/engines, etc?
It is perhaps something to speculate that maybe gloablization has gotten the best of us. Information spreads so quickly that it is hard not to believe that everything is overly scarce. By the time you digest information (and interpret it), there is literally something as big or bigger to comprehend and process in line to your mind - behind four other news items just like it ... the housing market down in the US, terrorist attacks in West Africa, multiple murder in your neighbourhood, cancer rates on the rise, your cholesterol is too high, and so on... We are spooked by our own economic shadows!
Surely it is
not natural for us to be able to communicate trans-oceanically, clear as a bell, in mere split seconds and multiple languages (near simultaneously at times!). Is it truly more 'cost effective' to hire a person in India to consult on a job that will bring raw materials from China to North America, partially assembled, when we are all capable of these sorts of things domestically? These are all realities of today that were not so (or as commonly experienced) less than 50 years ago. That is still within the knowledge of three generations of our relatively puny life spans.
Financial knowledge
especially is only slowly beginning to trickle out into the hands of the general population... it is making currency that much more influential and immediate on top of it all.
I'd have to say: welcome to a short term supply run up in a (global) market that is beginning to experience some serious pressure to move more closely to perfectly elastic (theoretically speaking). I also have to support the theory that prices will be required to drop as both supply and demand respond appropriately, and we will marvel in how well the global free market was able to correct (perhaps even "over-correct" in the shortest of short terms) itself back to "sanity".
I just sincerely hope that
great panic does not grip us and that we will be able to maintain levelheadedness in a time that would suggest that nothing is as it was once before.