IT WAS only a decade or so ago that Scotland was hit by the “Great Drain Robbery”, the disappearance of 50 manhole covers in Fife. It gave an inkling of the emergence of a new era in commodity markets, spurred by insatiable demand from China. Scrap-metal prices—and so scrap-metal thefts—soared. Africa was over-run by Chinese engineers; Australia elected a Mandarin-speaking prime minister; and emerging markets from Argentina to Zambia relished the rising values of their farmland and mines. The boom was fanned by a weak American dollar, the currency in which most stuff that comes out of the ground is priced.
The gears have now gone into reverse. A resurgent dollar has hammered commodity prices: many have recently fallen below their levels of a decade ago. That is a fate not shared by other tradeable assets: not since the late 1990s have commodity prices been so weak compared with shares (see chart 1). The American economy is strengthening, but by no means enough to encourage thieves to filch bronze bells from Chinese temples to send as scrap to the United States. The impact of its recovery is dwarfed by slowing demand in China, which still consumes...
from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1TZDBMr
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