The Giant Pool Of Money. Implications

Unlike Ruff, I doubt that gold and silver make concious decisions about their own prices. More likely, the increase in their cost represents an increase in demand, presumably linked to all the people going around recommending the purchase of gold to keep your money safe in troubled times. Up compared to what? The price yesterday? The price in October 1975? These figures are meaningless without context.Let's look at some that he lists. He mentions coffee being up 45%, so I had a look. Coffee is 0.8% down in price since last month, or 33.67% up since last year. He claims that pork is up 68%. All I can find is pork bellies, which are down 3.59% since last month, or up 23.64% since last year.I did find some numbers which looked higher than his. Cotton is up 24.51% since last month, or 70.55% since last year. The point is that his numbers, without explaining the time period under discussion, don't tell us anything whatsoever. All these figures come from CNN's money pages. which has a nice little graphic which shows where current prices for each commodity are compared to the range of prices over the last year. It ranges from natural gas, at which the current price is the lowest it's been in the last year, to gold and silver, in which the current price is the highest.Clearly, things aren't as simple as Mr. Ruff would have us believe.

You're missing the point. I assume the 25% you're talking about in a year is for pork bellies. Okay, let's take this as a significant and dramatic figure. Obviously, as you say, a month is far too short a time to judge a commodity's direction seriously. In fact, a year seems far too short to me. Let's look at the two year trend instead.Well, if we do that, pork prices have risen only 14.6%. That doesn't seem quite as bad, but inflation's still galloping!To get a clearer idea, let's instead use what I guess must be Ruff's technique, and pick an arbitrary point in the past which gives us a percentage we like the look of. Oh no! Since March 2007 pork belly prices have dropped 7.5%!!! The bottom's falling out of the commodity market!!!

Interesting that you should resurrect this thread now, Phat. I believe you owe crashfrog some money...

Apologies for any offence Phat - I had forgotten about the gambling.

Most trading is not done by governments - it's done by private entities. And there is no danger that they will stop trading with the US. There is still a lot of money in America, and people who have things to sell will continue to sell them.Even when governments do business, they usually put basic economic concerns above their opinions of a government. That's why Saudi Arabia, the absolutist monarchy that exports religious extremism and terrorism at an astonishing rate, is the big friend and ally of the west. It's all about the money.Also worth bearing in mind when jar talks about the size of the European economy is that a lot of the biggest players in that economy are US companies.

I work for a company that talks a lot about becoming a non-US based company (they say 'globally-centric rather than US-centric' which is absurd corporate gobbledegook. 'Acentric' would make sense. 'Globally-centric' is meaningless). Nevertheless, they are still clearly a US based company, and will be for some time.The gradual shift in US multinationals to becoming anational will continue, but that will continue regardless of what any US President does. The only way to prevent it, in my opinion, would be by trying to turn back the clock by imposing prohibitve tarriffs on cross-border trade. I can't see that flying, but then I also thought Trump would never be elected, so let's see.