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On October 7, 2022, US congressman Alex Mooney (a Republican from West Virginia) introduced a bill (the Gold Standard Restoration Act, H.R. 9157) that stipulates that the US dollar must be backed by physical gold owned by the US Treasury. The initiative clearly indicates that the increasingly inflationary US dollar is triggering efforts to get better money.It should be noted that there have already been many legislative changes to make precious metals more attractive as a means of payment in recent years: in many US states, the value-added and capital gains taxes on gold and silver, but also on platinum...

Thomson Reuters/CoreCommodity CRB Index is calculated using arithmetic average of commodity futures prices with monthly rebalancing. The index consists of 19 commodities: Aluminum, Cocoa, Coffee, Copper, Corn, Cotton, Crude Oil, Gold, Heating Oil, Lean Hogs, Live Cattle, Natural Gas, Nickel, Orange Juice, RBOB Gasoline, Silver, Soybeans, Sugar and Wheat. Those commodities are sorted into 4 groups, with different weightings: Energy: 39%, Agriculture: 41%, Precious Metals: 7%, Base/Industrial Metals: 13%.

What is water trading? The market allows farmers, hedge funds, and municipalities to hedge bets on the future price of water and water availability in the American West. The new trading scheme was announced in September, prompted by the region’s worsening heat, drought, and wildfires. Water trading pros and cons Proponents argue the new market will clear up some of the uncertainty around water prices for farmers and municipalities, helping them budget for the resource. But some experts say treating water as a tradable commodity puts a basic human right into the hands of financial institutions and investors. Wall Street’s...

Dominic Frisby, MoneyWeek August 7, 2015 How much gold does China have? The question won’t go away, because the answer is vital. The answer could define, in no uncertain terms, how important or irrelevant gold is in the modern world. Is gold obsolete, or does it still have a significant role to play?Today we consider that question, and look once again at China’s gold... Gold – useless shiny pet rock or the very essence of money? Some people argue that gold is just an inert, useless metal, good for little more than jewellery. Its role in finance is as obsolete...

U.S. stocks traded lower on Monday as the continued selloff in commodities and an overnight plunge in Shanghai stocks pressured sentiment amid a lackluster earnings season. The S&P 500 briefly dipped below its 200-day moving average of 2,064.14 and attempted to hold above it.

Late-term abortionist Dr. Warren Hern, who performs abortions in the second and third trimesters in his clinic in Boulder, Colorado, wrote an editorial some time ago complaining about how abortionists are treated. First he complained that abortionists are not given the respect they deserve in the clinics: Increasingly, doctors have been made to feel irrelevant. Feminist abortion clinics treat doctors like technicians and are especially contemptuous of male physicians. Entrepreneurs who treat abortion strictly as a retail business also tend to treat doctors as technicians. Doctors who perform abortions have usually acquiesced in these roles, and their status has plummeted...

Cratering crude-oil prices may be a blessing to cash-strapped American consumers, but it’s a double-edged sword when it comes to the overall economy. The problem for the overall economy is not so much the drop in oil prices as it is the velocity at which oil prices have fallen. The plunge from a peak of just over $100 per barrel in the early summer to today’s $58 — a massive 42 percent drop in just a few short months, most of which has come in the last 90 days — could make anyone’s head spin. The rapid fall in crude...

By 2015 hard commodity prices will have collapsed Posted by Michael on September 16, 2012 in Commodities For the past two years, as regular readers know, I have been bearish on hard commodities. Prices may have dropped substantially from their peaks during this time, but I don’t think the bear market is over. I think we still have a very long way to go. There are four reasons why I expect prices to drop a lot more.　First, during the last decade commodity producers were caught by surprise by the surge in demand. Their belated response was to ramp up production...

America’s drought pain is Argentina’s revenue gain as prices soar for soy, corn, wheat By Associated Press, Published: July 19 BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — America’s loss is Argentina’s gain. Record soy prices due to a punishing drought in the U.S. heartland are expected to create billions of dollars in new revenue for the South American country, which is the world’s third-largest soy producer behind the U.S. and Brazil. Prices for soybeans for August delivery gained 50.25 cents, or 3 percent, to end at $17.3375 a bushel. Corn also beat its all-time high of a year ago, with September deliveries rising...

The next time you drive to the gas station, only to find prices are still sky high compared to just a few years ago, take notice of the rows of foreclosed houses you'll pass along the way. They may seem like two parts of a spell of economic bad luck, but high gas prices and home foreclosures are actually very much interrelated. Before most people were even aware there was an economic crisis, investment managers abandoned failing mortgage-backed securities and looked for other lucrative investments. What they settled on was oil futures. An oil future is simply a contract between...

Eric Burroughs Warning signs on market liquidity risks May 15, 2011 07:28 EDT If the great commodity selloff of 2011 shows nothing else, it is that markets are undergoing serious structural changes that need to be followed closely. Our commodities analyst John Kemp has compared the oil plunge with the May 2010 flash crash in U.S. shares, and rightfully so. Four standard deviation moves in oil futures are not normal, even if Gaussian distributions underestimate the chance of such a move. The rise of high-speed electronic trading appears to be creating imbalances between buyers and sellers in nanoseconds that lead...

Rising food and energy prices could deal a $70 billion blow to the economy, but the recovery is likely to limp along anyway. If the recent run-up in energy and agricultural commodities persists, U.S. consumers will have to shell out $20 billion more for energy and $50 billion more for food this year, Capital Economics estimates. Among other things, that squeeze on consumer budgets will eat up most of the payroll tax holiday bonus that Americans were supposed to get out of the deal in Congress that extended the Bush tax cuts, at some cost to the deficit. So much...

Is Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke stoking inflation? Of course he is. Anyone with common sense knows that if you give $600 billion cash to the banks with no qualifications -- as he did with the second round of quantitative easing -- they will use it to speculate in the markets. JPMorgan Chase (JPM) just bought $1 billion of copper. Bernanke's fatal mistake was that he placed no restrictions on what the banks would do with his $600 billion. If you opened the banks' books, you can bet that they've invested in commodities, currencies and foreign equities and bonds. What...

Precious metals outperformed most asset classes over a 3, 5 and 10 year period. Silver was a little late to the party. Silver is a business cycle sensitive investment against gold, which is a fear / value / wealth trade. Silver fell to its lowest level relative to gold in early 2009 as the silver price went as low as $8.92, which was 84th of an ounce of gold. However, as the business cycle turned, it became one of the best performing assets in 2010. This outperformance looks set to continue in 2011 due to the very bullish fundamentals. Many...

Let me say that again. ALL MONEY COMES FROM DEBT (for those of us who suffered the most indoctrination by attending schools like Harvard, let's pause here for a moment so we can catch up to the rest of the class). This means in order for governments, businesses, and people to have the liquidity necessary to live, they must agree to sign over a claim on their assets to banks. As the banking system inflates over time passing out credit, which makes everyone feel good with more digits in their accounts, it gathers claims on all the assets in the...

Everything from gold to rubber is reaching new highs. And that's just one of many landmines the stock market bulls are ignoring. If Chuck Prince were in the game today, he would be dancing. In 2007, the former Citigroup CEO famously addressed a question about the bank's push into the booming mortgage market by saying: "As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance. We're still dancing." As we well know, that music eventually stopped and many of the revelers were crushed. But memories are short. Today, plenty of investors are dancing as the S&P...

On March 17th of 2010 the self regulatory organization for commodities trading and retail foreign currency transactions in the United States, National Futures Association (“NFA”), announced a major change to the way Hedge, Commodity, and Forex funds operate. The change, titled “Compliance Rule 2-46” is NFA’s latest effort to work towards detecting and eliminating Madoff Style investment frauds within the industries they regulate. In order to comply with any set of new regulatory standards one has to first understand the intentions and implications of the adjusted policy. So what then does this adjustment mean for the commodity and forex industries?...

In the bank's latest edition of its Monday Mining Minutes, Citi lays out a scenario which it calls the "Nightmare on Commodity Street." (via FT Energy Source) So here’s the nightmare scenario, which we hope will not happen: Thousands of very smart speculators have accumulated the biggest ever speculative physical raw material positions ever witnessed in the belief that either the dollar will collapse or an ongoing global ‘Supercycle’ will shake off the effects of the credit crunch and resume business as usual. They are funded in this venture by some of the lowest interest rates on record. What are...

Crops Headed For A Tough Harvest by: Jim Delaney November 03, 2009 Although it appears the prospects for the producers of porcine products have prettied, yes, lipstick included, that cannot be said for all of the ‘ole MacDonald’s in the country. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported recently that due to a late planting season and a cooler and wetter fall than normal, only 20% of the corn crop is out of the fields vs. an average of 58% during the years of 2004-2008. “It’s getting scarier. The longer we go, the more mold keeps growing and the more ears...

The Agri-Food investment story has been unfolding for more than three years, and has another ten or so years to go. For that reason, investors still have plenty of time to uncover the opportunities for profits in a world soon to be far more hungry. Agri-Food cannot be produced in factories with lower marginal costs for new production. Unlike consumer electronics, marginal production will have a higher cost. For centuries mankind has sought to satisfy hunger. Only in the second half of the 19th century did food become more plentiful with improved availability. Yet even after that period food was...