Quote from Hydroblunt:
Because you still do not understand the difference between supply/demand & inflation/deflation. What has happened to commodities is mostly inflation, with a significant supply/demand component.
If operations are being moved offshore to China, why would the demand for oil go up so much? It's the same operations, scaled up some amount, but not that much. The real increasing demand component on crude comes from US transport & distribution & autos in China & India. I'll throw in some for population growth and increased driving by US people, but still, it's not enough to justify such high oil prices.
Demand on copper & steel came from construction in US & China, however, it was nowhere near high enough to justify such huge gains in price.
I won't argue that fed policy of increasing monetary supply and 'inflation targeting' has put an inflationary bias into the dollar the past 100 yrs. It'd be foolish to take the opposing argument. And certainly over time a portion of the price ascent of commodities can be attributed to broad inflation.
But the severity of this commodity price runup has more to do with structural differences in the world economy from the 1950s. My point is additionally that most of the upward price bias on commodities lately comes from political mismanagement (er, lack of planning) of our resources rather than merely fed liquidity injections.
The fact that you don't agree that s/d economics support $90 crude (and that instead most of this move is inflationary, reflective of the dollar) is just as argueably ungrounded and arbitrary as my assumption that the fundamentals in many of these commodity markets *are* actually different this time. World wheat inventories at 25-30 yr historic lows, corn ethanol subsidies, reactive underplantings, and feed replacements are just the picture of the soft ag complex going through actual supply worries. And this would not be happening if there were not very real supply issues in the energy complex, nor if world demand for these crops were not actually there.
You may argue this is all a response to years of wreckless liquidity pumping of the US govt, and the use of a flawed fractional reserve banking system.
I take the middle ground and say that this may account for a smaller proportion of this price move up (lets say 20-30%) - the rest (70-80%) is the fault of shitty US policy run by non-business savvy constituent concerned politicians, in combination with *political* changes to the world stage: globalization of trade, productivity increases from technological progress, and economic equalization of the masses due to dissolution of capitilalistically repressive political systems.
But I do agree with the whole argument that fed policy is inflationary, dollar devaluing. If you double the money supply (half the value of a notional unit in real terms) across the same population, you enable prices of everything to double.
Booms and busts do occur, and a loaf of bread may be $12 in another twenty years, but thats the price of progress. There's a reason the gold standard is abandoned every time a country needs to raise $$$ for war - its not flexible enough to fund events outside the normal scope of fiscal maintenance.
Just imagine how the tech boom in the last 15 yrs may not have happened if the capital did not exist to fund it. Sure we have paid a price, but the reality is that we have infinitely gained. Lifespans are expanded from health care progress (from free cash in the system); and more people now enjoy a level of living that *IS* without a doubt better than it was 100 years ago because of that.
We may be unhappier, richer, and live longer in our more modernized lives than the simpler ag based societies without technology or innovation, but that is I think more due to cultural characteristics in our society (the American dream/capitalism is founded on being unhappy with what you have).
The dollar may have been worth more in gold terms 100 yrs ago, but the middle class today lives more comfortably than Rockefeller did during that same time period.