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March 01, 2005 Gold Investments Weekly Newsletter |
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Weekly Markets Precious Metals Gold is now up 10.2% in the last 52 weeks. Silver, after last weeks big price move up was down 1.3% for the week, platinum slipped 0.8%, palladium fell 1.5% and copper was virtually flat and remains at record highs. Silver at $7.31 is up 14.55% in two months since January 4th when it hit a low of $6.34. According to Nymex inventories data, gold dropped by 675 troy ounces, putting total inventories at nearly 5.914 mln troy ounces as of the close of business Thursday, while silver inventories fell by 14,112 troy ounces from a day earlier to stand at 101.79 mln troy ounces. Copper inventories were unchanged at 46,815 short tons. As for the benchmarks tracking mining stocks, the Philadelphia Gold/Silver Index closed at 98.88 points, up 0.4 pct, while the CBOE Gold Index ended up 0.2 pct at 87.50 and the Amex Gold Bugs Index gained 0.3 pct to 215.36. Commodities These commodity price increases fed into the high Producer Price Index (PPI) number of +0.8% for January alone. These higher prices for raw materials used in all the goods we buy has somehow not yet fed into the Consumer Price Index (CPI) which remained surprisingly benign last week at +0.1%. This may mean that companies do not believe that US consumers will bear an increase in prices and thus are choosing not to pass on the increased costs to consumers. This has an implication for corporate profits going forward. The Wall Street Journal's Justin Lahart put it thus: "One might think that if importers and wholesalers are paying higher prices, they'd pass them on to consumers, but in practice this doesn't always work. The Labor Department's method for gathering prices varies from report to report, with the CPI based on telephone interviews with vendors and on staff visits to stores in the first 18 working days of each month, and the PPI and import-price index meant to reflect prices on a single day. At the same time, the reports aren't meant to show the same things. The CPI indicates what consumers are paying for goods, while the PPI indicates what producers are receiving for goods." There are concerns that the Bureau of Labour statistics is underestimating the CPI. Bill Fleckenstein of MSN Money has written how the US government is manufacturing low inflation. "Please join me this week in a trip to the government department responsible for fun with numbers. Those D.C. statisticians may churn out their work with a straight face, but that doesn't mean we have to fall for it. Among the sceptics are Steve Milunovich of Merrill Lynch, Jim Grant of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, and, of course, yours truly. . . . The CPI will never show inflation of any consequence. The CPI has been engineered specifically not to. Housing-price increases have essentially been removed, via the way in which owner-equivalent rents are calculated, and they cannot possibly reflect what's happened to house prices. Then, when one adds in hedonics (which strips out many price increases by assuming they are quality improvements) and factors in the substitution allowances in the data, it is clear that the CPI is not going to ring any sort of alarm bells. Fleckenstein has also called hedonics a 'miracle' tonic for an ailing economy: "For those of you who don't know, hedonics is the way the government transforms price declines into quality improvements. . . . Our government has admitted its Alice in Wonderland hedonic-adjustment exercise has produced numbers so distorted that it doesn't want to show them to you. Yet it continues to use the "analysis" and some of the data in calculations of real GDP, productivity growth and CPI calculations." Currencies The dollar dropped the most in six months against the euro and the most in four months versus the yen on Feb. 22, after the Bank of Korea said it intended to change the mix of its reserves, or holdings of foreign currencies. Denials the next day by Japan and South Korea, which hold most of the world's currency reserves, of any plans to sell dollars failed to alleviate investor concern. "One of the Asian central banks saying they may reduce their holdings of U.S. assets got everybody nervous," said Andrew Busch, a currency strategist at Harris Nesbitt Corp. in Chicago. "The risk involved with that possibility is going to make people be on pins and needles for a while." Lara Rhame, a currency strategist at Credit Suisse First Boston in New York said "Asset diversification among foreign central banks is having a big impact on the dollar. It will continue to weigh on the currency." Stocks Bonds Should the recently flattening U.S. government debt curve invert, with short-term yields above longer-term yields, the graph could be flashing a warning - recession. The Federal Reserve would have to rethink its interest-rate policy, and soon. "If this curve were to invert, which I don't think it will, it would be the first time since Bretton Woods [economic summit in 1944] that the curve was flattening with short-term and long-term rates going in opposite directions," said Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist with Charles Schwab. Oil and the Irish and European Consumer US Treasury Secretary John Snow also said the price of crude oil is "too high," in an interview. "I'm not happy about oil prices one bit," he said. Peter Mandleson also warned that the rising oil prices may have an adverse effect on EU consumers. This week crude oil prices may rise from a four-month high on concern that production will fail to keep pace with strengthening demand, according to a Bloomberg survey of analysts and strategists. Twenty-eight of 54 respondents, or 52 per cent, predicted oil prices will climb next week. Thirteen, or 25 per cent, said prices will fall and another 13 forecast little change. A week ago, 44 per cent of respondents said prices would rise. Fourteen of the last 21 surveys correctly predicted the market's direction. Global demand may average 84 million barrels a day in 2005, while daily production in January was only 83.6 million barrels, according to the International Energy Agency. Oil prices have risen 11 per cent in the past three weeks in New York on growing concern that OPEC and other exporters will fail to keep up with demand this year. China is also sucking in an increasing proportion of the world's resources. Last year's oil price spike was largely driven by the unanticipated explosion in demand from China, which was guzzling 1 million more barrels a day than in 2003. 'To give you an idea of the scale of it, in March last year, 1,000 cars a day were being registered in Beijing,' says Kevin Norrish, commodities analyst at Barclays. He believes China's extraordinary appetite for resources is far from sated. 'The potential for growth is enormous: China's moving up the development curve, and that's likely to continue for some time.' The Chief Economist of Ulster Bank, Pat McArdle pointed out during the week how the rapidly rising oil price is more in dollar terms than in euro terms and thus should not be a concern to us in the Eurozone. This is a little simplistic as it forgets that the Eurozone's main export market is the US and an increasing oil price will curtail US consumers ability to continue purchasing goods manufactured in the EU and priced in euros. It also ignores the fact that oil shocks, like the one that may be developing, have an awfully perfect track record - they have always been followed by recession in the US. The recent oil price rise has not created a recession as of yet and hopefully it will not. So far it still trails the big oil price moves of the past. In inflation-adjusted dollars, oil peaked in 1981 at $73 a barrel, 40% above where it's trading today (some $52 a barrel). Back then, moreover, the oil crisis sparked a full-blown recession. Today, despite some signs of a slowing, the economy continues to grow -- and, with it, oil demand, especially from rapidly industrialising India, China and Asia. It's precisely this steadily rising demand, however, that is worrying the market. Unlike in the 1970s, the problem this time isn't primarily a supply shock in which the world's biggest oil spigots have been shut off. It's that, even though they're wide open, the world is consuming pretty much everything that comes out of the ground. The resulting fear is that isolated supply disruptions due to increasing tensions with Venezuela and or Russia, a war with Iran, geopolitical instability in the Middle East -- could push prices even higher. Complacency regarding the oil price is not advised and is certainly not prudent. Weekly Commentary Why should Irish, UK and European investors invest a small percentage of their investment portfolio in gold and silver? There are a myriad of fundamental reasons that European investors, institutions and Central Banks should continue to diversify a small portion of their assets into precious metals. These include rising interest rates in the world's largest economy; record consumer, mortgage and national debt levels in the US & much of the western world; huge and unprecedented US trade and budget deficits and dwindling supply of and increasing demand for precious metals. Two other fundamental factors to consider are the decline and depreciation of the US dollar and the rise of oil prices. The dollar is currently the primary global reserve currency. To explain how this relatively recent monetary phenomenon came about I defer to this succinct explanation by John Mauldin, President of Millenium Wave Advisers: "The first Bretton Woods system came about when representatives of most of the world's leading nations met towards the end of World War 11 at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944 to create a new international monetary system. Because the US at the time accounted for over half of the world's manufacturing capacity and held most of the world's gold, the leaders decided to tie world currencies to the dollar, which, in turn, they agreed should be convertible into gold at $35 per ounce. Under the Bretton Woods system, central banks of countries other than the US were given the task of maintaining fixed exchange rates between their currencies and the dollar. They did this by intervening in foreign exchange markets. If a country's currency was too high relative to the dollar, its central bank would sell its currency in exchange for dollars, driving down the value of its currency. Conversely, if the value of a country's money was too low, the country would buy its own currency, thereby driving up the price. The dollar became the world's reserve currency. Yet there were limits. Each country had to police its own reserves and currency or be forced to revalue. And the US was constrained because the dollar was fully convertible into gold. This changed in 1971 when Nixon closed the gold window. Now we have what many are coming to call a Bretton Woods 2 system. That is where much of the world, but primarily the Asian countries, have more or less informally agreed to peg their currencies to the dollar. They do this in order to maintain their relative competitive ability to sell their products to the world and specifically to the US. But this system is inherently more unstable than the first Bretton Woods. There is no gold conversion constraint upon the reserve currency. The US has few reasons to protect the value of the currency, and many reasons why they should want it to drop. And there is no formal agreement among the nations. Any nation at any time could begin to act unilaterally to change. Russia has specifically said they would start to have a larger euro component to their growing national reserves. Thailand has said the same, and indications are that they are putting actions behind their words." Mauldin penned these thoughts only last week and published them on the 19th of February. His thoughts were very prescient as last Tuesday the 22nd, the Bank of Korea caused a sharp sell off of the dollar and uncertainty in financial markets when a senior official said that the Central Bank of Korea would be diversifying out of their huge dollar holdings. Subsequently this was understandably denied. As of Feb 15, South Korea held foreign-exchange reserves of $200.25 billion, making it the world's fourth largest after Japan, China and Taiwan. Japan topped the reserves chart at $840.966 billion as of the end of January, according to Ministry of Finance data. China's foreign-exchange reserves stood at $609.9 billion at the end of 2004, good enough for No. 2 following Japan. China, like many countries, doesn't reveal the composition of its reserves, but U.S. dollar-denominated assets are believed to account for somewhere between 60 and 80 percent. Should these Asian countries or other countries stop buying US debt instruments or even worse start selling them and diversifying their foreign currency reserves into other currencies such as the euro and even gold it will create difficulties for the massively indebted US consumers, households, companies, financial institutions, states and government. The New York Times editorialised: " . . . as the Korean comment ping-ponged around the world, all hell broke loose, with currency traders selling dollars for fear that the central banks of Japan and China, which hold immense dollar reserves -- a combined $900 billion, or 46 percent of foreign Treasury holdings -- might follow suit. That would be the United States' worst economic nightmare. Tuesday's market episode has its roots in American structural imbalances that will be corrected only by new policies, not more of the same tax-cut-and-weak-dollar deficit-bloating ploys." In a similiar vein CBS Market Watch article entitled 'South Korea reports raise 'what-if' talk about China', Lisa Twaronite wrote how "reports that South Korea is thinking of diversifying its currency reserves caused market ripples, but a similar hint from China could cause a tsunami. This once again highlights the economic vulnerability of the US. As the world's largest debtor there economic destiny is now in the hands of their creditors - the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Indians and the EU. The US is dependent upon the rest of the world's savings in order to fund their massive debt - total credit market debt (government, corporations, and individuals) is at $34.62 trillion and growing. This debt is now three times the size of the annual value of all goods and services in the US or 305% of GDP. On the eve of the Great Depression in 1929 total credit market debt was 260%. 
As the current global reserve currency the US dollar's performance against other fiat currencies has massive financial and economic implications for the individual economies of the world and for the global economy. This is especially the case as our global economy has become more integrated in recent years with increasing cross border trade and cross border flows of capital. In this increasingly globalised economy, the performance of the primary means of exchange and payment for commodities, goods and services internationally is of vital importance. The economic and monetary paradigm of the final years of the 20th Century was a very benign one. The Clinton and Greenspan era of the booming 1990's when the US economy enjoyed tremendous rates of growth, low inflation and the increasing productivity brought about by innovative new technologies resulted in capital flowing into the US and consequently this led to the "strong dollar". With the Cold War over there was far less geopolitical uncertainty and investors, institutions and Central Banks around the world had confidence and faith in US capital markets and the US dollar. Since 2000 the collapse of the Nasdaq, the Enron and WorldCom accounting scandals, September 11th and the Bush Administrations response to it in the form of the 'War on Terror' and the burgeoning trade and budget deficits have all led to a gradual and growing erosion of confidence in the US dollar and increasingly the US economy itself. Investors, institutions and Central Banks are increasingly sceptical of the US' ability to correct the massive imbalances in their economy without an economic downturn. This has led to the falling dollar and has become so serious that some respected economic commentators are discussing the possibility that the euro may supplant the dollar as the global reserve currency in the next 10 to 20 years. This may happen in a far shorter time frame were OPEC or the authorities in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and or Venezuela to price their oil in euros. This would likely end the economic paradigm of the petrodollar which has been in place since Nixon closed the gold window in 1971. Up until 1933 gold was money and every dollar was backed by gold. This meant that dollars were in fact paper gold certificates or promises to pay a certain amount of gold. When Roosevelt ended the gold standard in 1933, he banned the export of gold, halted the ability of US citizens to convert their paper dollars into gold and also ordered a gold confiscation whereby US citizens had to hand in all the gold they possessed (this prohibition on gold lasted until 31 December 1974). International governments could still redeem their their paper dollars for gold in the post War period and up until 1971.However this link between the dollar and gold was broken unilaterally by the US in 1971 after it had spent many more dollars into circulation internationally to pay for the Vietnam war than it had gold in Fort Knox to back them. Fearing that the dollar's value had become unsustainable, holders led by the French under President de Gaulle rushed to convert them to gold before a devaluation happened. A run on the global bank (the US) began and the manager, President Nixon responded by refusing the holders of the promissory notes the US had issued what they were due. He defaulted by 'closing the gold window', thus ending any fixed relationship whatever between the dollar and gold. This destroyed the key feature of the Bretton Woods system which, in retrospect, seems to have served the world reasonably well. What emerged in its place was a more haphazard arrangement which allowed the defaulter, the world's richest and most powerful country, to reap a massive benefit by creating the majority of the global money supply with no formal constraints at all. "There can be no other criterion, no other standard than gold. Yes, gold which never changes, which can be shaped into ingots, bars, coins, which has no nationality and which is eternally and universally accepted as the unalterable fiduciary value par excellence." This is Charles de Gaulle, the President of France's famous quote. He realised that the basic laws of nature and economics - the law of supply and demand meant that gold was a safer store of long term value and thus a more trustworthy universal medium of exchange. This is because there are is a finite amount of gold in the world and it takes a lot of money, labour and time to extract the precious metal from the bowels of the earth. Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan's likely successor as Federal Reserve Governor recently told us " Like gold, U.S. dollars have value only to the extent that they are strictly limited in supply. But the U.S. government has a technology called a printing press , that allows us to print as many dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost". In effect Bernanke threatened a massive devaluation of the dollar in order to pay for their massive internal and external debt obligations. While the euro supplanting the dollar would be hugely beneficial to the increasingly powerful European Union in the medium to long term, the transition would undoubtedly be painful in the short to medium term. The dislocations and uncertainty created would likely be damaging to the performance of equity, bond and property markets and result in an increasing flow of capital into the precious metals markets and a consequent increase in prices. An increasingly strong euro is a double edged sword and confers advantages and disadvantages. A strong euro threatens the recovery of the large European economies. Jean Claude Trichet has called the rise in the Euro both brutal and unwelcome as the Euro zone's fragile recovery is export driven and thus European manufactured goods are becoming more expensive to US consumers and imports into the EU are becoming cheaper to European consumers. Already the two major economies in the Eurozone, Germany and France are experiencing unemployment rates of more than 10%. Economic commentators such as Stephen Roach, the Chief Economist of Morgan Stanley have warned of a possible 1930's like beggar my neighbour type round of competitive currency devaluations. Dr. Richard Appel of Financial Insights in an article entitled 'Gold and the broadening spectre of competitive currency devaluations' explains what a global round of competitive currency devaluations would entail: "Throughout modern history, periods of worldwide economic decline have been accompanied by spates of competitive currency devaluations. These have repeatedly occurred during difficult times as country after country, in their effort to gain an advantage over their trading partners, fostered a weakening of their currencies. The hope of each domain has always been that a weaker domestic currency would stimulate world demand for their goods and services. This, they believed, would foster an increase in their output and generate a renewed round of economic expansion. It always began with one nation's attempt to benefit itself, but ultimately spiralled out of control when others followed their lead. In practice, using currency devaluations to enhance one's domestic economy has never worked for long. The reason is simple. It is one of human nature. What was consistently overlooked was that other governments would not stand by idly. They would not allow a competing country the ability to gain an upper hand and a trade advantage over them. To the detriment of all, the end result of each such experiment has produced animosity between the engaged nations, a worsening of their economic declines, and it has even led to war. It is a glaring frailty of mankind that neither individuals nor politicians rarely seem to learn from the experiences of their predecessors." Competitive currency devaluations globally as well as higher import prices result in significant inflation and significantly higher interest rates in individual countries. Moreover, the price of gold increases in terms of these competitively devaluing currencies and the assets denominated in these fiat currencies. This is one of the most fundamental reasons to consider diversifying a small percentage of one's wealth into precious metals. Quotes of the Week "I teach Financial Management on a part-time basis in DCU and a central
tenet of what I teach concerns the virtues of portfolio diversification.
I am a firm believer and have argued in numerous presentations on the topic
of Property v Equities that it is not a case of either/or, but a case of
both. I would be a big fan of holding gold as part of a diversified portfolio
and would feel more confident about it than any other asset class at the
moment." "Irish property investors have roamed far and wide of late in search of
the kind of investment returns seen at home over the past decade. . . . The
average UK house cost over £152,000 (EUR 220,000) at the end of 2004,
according to the Nationwide Building Society, against £75,000 five
years earlier, a 100% capital return over the period. This upward trend has
faltered of late, however, and the UK housing market has clearly slowed,
lending support to those predicting a sharp correction or even a price collapse." "However, within these positive signs lie serious threats and challenges.
We are all aware of the large US current account and fiscal deficits. These
are matched-or financed, if you will-by growing surpluses in Japan, emerging
Asia, and certain oil-exporting countries. This constellation of large deficits
in one country, with counterpart surpluses being concentrated in a few others,
is what we mean when we speak of global imbalances. . . . What is undesirable,
however, is an unsustainable deficit. And experience shows that the current
account deficits of the order that the US has been running cannot be sustained
indefinitely. . . . At the end of the day, today's accumulation of large
deficits in the US, with matching surpluses in only a few countries, cannot
go on forever. The current account deficit of the US is already being financed
by record levels of debt in the hands of foreign investors. It is highly
unlikely that such easy credit will continue to be available to the US on
the basis of the existing policy path." "When a country lives on borrowed time, borrowed money and borrowed energy,
it is just begging the markets to discipline it in their own way at their
own time. . . . . . usually the markets do it in an orderly way - except
when they don't." "The world economy appears on the verge of a slowdown. (Japan and Germany,
among the five largest economies, are technically in recession.) The consumer
has begun to show signs of reining in spending. So one would think that semiconductor-equipment
makers, as capital-goods suppliers to a cyclical industry -- one burdened
by excess capacity and swimming in inventory -- would be the last place someone
would want to invest. Yet that's exactly what passes for investment wisdom
on Wall Street today." "The US economy will have its 'Day of Reckoning' in the words of former
US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, thanks to its monstrous indebtedness
and a poor demographic outlook. The same factors also pointed to further
weakness for the US dollar. Gold is a good hedge against dollar weakness
and the twin US deficits." "When people ask what we are doing about these twin vulnerabilities [twin
deficits], they have a hard time coming up with an answer. There is no energy
policy and no real effort to reduce our voracious demand of foreign capital.
The U.S. pulled in 80 percent of total world savings last year largely to
finance our consumption. That's a big reason why some 43 percent of all U.S.
Treasury bills, notes and bonds are now held by foreigners. These countries
don't have to dump dollars - they just have to reduce their purchases of
them for the dollar to be severely affected. Korea is the fourth-largest
holder of dollar reserves. ... You don't want others to see them diversifying
and say, 'We'd better do that, too, so that we're not the last ones out.'
Remember, the October 1987 stock market crash began with a currency crisis." "When the US loses its appetite for borrowed money, the effects will be
felt around the world. American consumers are going in the same direction
as those in Australia and Britain, slashing saving because of the property
wealth illusion. This trend has come under Greenspan's worried scrutiny.
When tighter monetary policy begins to bite, consumers will spend less. This
has happened in Australia in the past six months, for the same reason. By
the end of this year, GDP growth in the US will fall below Greenspan's rosy
prediction of 4%. But that is not the end of it. America's big-spending consumers
have kept factories busy in Europe, Japan, and especially China. Any fall
in this profligacy will be felt around the world." "The new economic paradigm is that credit deflation begets inflationary
outcomes. Gold, far from being irrelevant and antiquated, is the ideal lens
through which to appraise this reality. As perfect credit, it will become
more highly valued when investors attempt to shed assets impaired by decades
of imperfect credit. A four-digit handle on the dollar gold price will signify
not that the markets love gold. Instead, it will mean that they despise the
alternatives. There is no specific reason to think that the movement in this
direction should be precipitous. Bear markets have a way of taking their
time, the better to deceive and to entrap as many as possible. Those who
believe a business upturn will end the bear market [in stocks] will be among
them. While there may appear to be no particular rush, violent shifts in
market views usually come with little warning. An allocation in favour of
gold would seem to be timely. The dollar's days as the premier global reserve
currency are numbered. The repercussions of a dollar devaluation will be
profound and long-lived. It is not too soon for investors to assume defensive
positions in light of these prospects and it will not be long before they
discover that gold is a core component of investment defence." "Gold is not exclusively linked to the vagaries of US currency markets
and, while other factors sometimes fail to make the headlines, they are no
less important for the long-term outlook for gold. . . . Investment demand
for gold has also picked up over the last couple of years. That's a very
important source of demand because it's not always price sensitive - investment
demand can rise as the gold price goes up because people like to buy things
that go up in value. . . . If you believe the US dollar will weaken further,
as many people do when they have a look at the big trade and budget deficits
in the US, the gold price might do quite well . . . .We're definitely in
a bull market for gold." "The U.S. current account deficit is more than five percent of gross domestic
product despite the dollar's three-year slide. . . . The oil exporting countries'
central banks ... have been switching out of dollars mainly into euros, and
Russia also plays an important role in this. That is, I think, at the bottom
of the current weakness of the dollar. The value and fate of the dollar is
linked to the price of oil. . . . The higher the price of oil, the more the
dollars there are to be switched to euro (so) the strength of oil will reinforce
the weakness of the dollar. That is only one factor, but I think there is
such a relationship. . . . . . The dollar's fall should help to lower the
U.S. current account and trade deficits but a fall beyond a tipping point
would severely disrupt markets." Peter Costello's [Australian Treasurer & Chief Economic Adviser] closest
adviser fears the US is heading for a devastating financial crash that could
ravage Australia's economic growth. As the Reserve Bank considers raising
interest rates at its board meeting next Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Ken
Henry likened the flood of money pouring into the US to support its budget
and current account deficits to the stockmarket's dotcom bubble of the late
1990s. Were it suddenly to stop, there would be shockwaves felt throughout
the world's economies. The financial crash feared by Dr Henry would involve
a sharp fall in the US dollar and a bond market sell-off, which would push
up US and world interest rates. . . . Fears that the world economy is in
grave danger are growing in the major financial capitals. The International
Monetary Fund, which is responsible for stability of the world economy, also
warned yesterday of a sudden collapse. "There are a lot of people who think the American budget deficit is too
high . . . . . I certainly would like to see the American budget deficit
reduced ... but it's too alarmist to talk about a crash." 
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Mark O'Byrne Brief Profile Gold & Silver Investments Limited is a precious metals brokerage company which sells and buys a wide variety of gold, silver and platinum numismatic and bullion products to all class of investor, companies and institutions in Ireland, the UK and internationally taking payment in all major currencies. We assist our clientele in diversifying their assets with a comprehensive range of precious metal coin and bar products and by allocated and unallocated precious metal storage facilities licensed by the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), Comex and Nymex and by other precious metal storage programs. Mission Statement Disclaimer -- Legal Notice: This article may be reproduced without the written permission of Gold & Silver Investments Limited as long as the author, Mark O'Byrne and the web sites www.goldassets.co.uk and www.gold.ie are acknowledged. Copyright © 2000-2009 www.goldassets.co.uk www.gold.ie Gold & Silver Investments Limited Image rendition and html coding Copyright © 2000-2009 SafeHaven.com ADVERTISEMENTS
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Massive
global demand particularly from industrialising Asia, in particular China and
India has led to a boom in commodities. The Reuters CRB index of 17 commodity
futures (basic components include hard tangible assets such as Metals, Textiles
and Fibers, Livestock and Products, Fats and Oils, Raw Industrials, Foodstuffs)
climbed above the technically and psychologically important $300 on Friday.
This was it's first time above $300 in 24 years and indicates that inflation
is on the rise.The Goldman Sachs Industrial Metals Index also made a new high
last week. Years of insufficient investment in commodity-supply infrastructure,
coupled with surging demand from emerging Asian economies, have fuelled predictions
that metals, grains, oil and other raw materials are in a sustained period
of rising prices akin to the stagflationary 1970's.