In a bit of synchronicity, food worries are getting prominent billing tonight in the media. The Financial Times” Martin Wolf sketches out some dimensions of snowballing agricultural problems and possible solutions. Wolf’s piece endeavors to cover a lot of ground, which means of necessity it gives short shrift to depth. It touches on the central […]
Read more...Dear readers, I will give more measured impressions of the Milken Conference in a day or so, when I it is over (we have another day, but the last day is far thinner in terms of offerings) and have had a day or so to reflect. However, to give a highlight, a subtext was was […]
Read more...A good piece in the New York Times today, “Price Volatility Adds to Worry on U.S. Farms,” describes how the runup in agricultural crop prices is making life harder for farmers. The recent upswing, and the entry of speculative capital, has led to a sharp increase in volatility (note that that’s the reverse of what […]
Read more...Paul Krugman, commenting on a Wall Street Journal article that invoked, then tried to dismiss, concerns about resource scarcity, defended Malthus: Malthus was right about the whole of human history up until his own era. Sumerian peasants in the 30th century BC lived on the edge of subsistence; so did French peasants in the 18th […]
Read more...Even though the seeming suddenness of the onset of food inflation and shortages has caught many by surprise, this too was predictable. I recall reading a Barrons Roundtable interview some years ago, perhaps around 2000, when Jim Rogers pointed out that China had set a goal for each person in the country to eat one […]
Read more...Food shortages have gotten an uptick in press coverage in the last two days due to a G7 pronouncement that was curiously interpreted differently by the New York Times and the Financial Times. First, the NY Times: The world’s economic ministers declared on Sunday that shortages and skyrocketing prices for food posed a potentially greater […]
Read more...Reader notice: a bit terse in our own commentary due to (grr) internet outage… A New York Times article, “Odd Crop Prices Defy Economics,” discusses the fact that there have been frequent disparities between cash and futures prices in some agricultural commodities since 2006. While this pattern has never taken place before and experts blame […]
Read more...As the goldbugs load up on gold futures, one of the main buyers of physical gold in pulling back. From the Financial Times: As India’s voracious appetite for gold wanes, producers of the precious metal are taking heed. Indian consumers buy about 25 per cent of the world’s gold, the vast majority of which is […]
Read more...I’m late to this item, which appeared in the Financial Times on Thursday, but according to Google News, was not reported elsewhere, so I thought it was still worth featuring. The IMF warned that commodities prices include a speculative element as investors are treating it as a new asset class and a safe haven in […]
Read more...We had observed that commodities prices looked overbought, historically fell during recessions, and in recent years had been strongly influenced by emerging market demand, which looked vulnerable to a US slowdown. These observations have proven out much sooner than we anticipated. Commodities continued their fall today. From Bloomberg; Gold headed for its biggest weekly drop […]
Read more...Jeff Frankel has a good set of posts on commodities, both appearing on his blog and on Brad Setser’s (as guest blogger entries). We are featuring them together here. The first section (which was a separate post) argues that “world growth no longer explains soaring commodity prices“; the second argues that interest rates are now […]
Read more...David Roche, who heads Independent Strategy, a London-based investment consultancy, argues today in the Financial Times tha the bull run in commodities is soon to come to an end. A big factor in the outlook for commodities is whether you believe our credit crisis will lead to inflation or deflation. Bernanke’s aggressive rate cuts and […]
Read more...I don’t see a story yet on Bloomberg, but commodity prices, even gold, have fallen despite the dollar’s fall. There is a story about oil falling $6 a barrel (!) but not about the commodity price decline generally. There has been only slight recovery of the dollar relative to the yen (97.2) so this was […]
Read more...The title of this article (provided by the page editors of the Telegraph) is a tad more sensationalistic than it need to be, but the basic observation holds: the Fed has gone so far in debasing the dollar that it is starting to see serious pushback from foreign investors. This is a serious matter. The […]
Read more...Long-term supply worries, and the poor prospects for the dollar have pushed long-term oil supply contract north of $100 a barrel. This is a negative development for airlines and utilities, who buy oil under long term contracts. Although the Financial Times does not give the whole profile of futures prices, it appears some interim prices […]
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