And what does the price of Ferro Nickel in India have to do with that spatula you used last night? Actually, quite a bit. India is about to cut the import duty for Ferro Nickel by 3% for 2008. According to this Economic Times article both nickel and chromium prices are also expected to fall […]

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For any consumer of Cobalt metal or components with any significant Cobalt content the price pressures must have been nigh on unbearable this past year. Driven by consumer demand and an element of speculative buying in the face of tight supplies, Cobalt has increased from $13/lb at the beginning of 2006 to $27/lb at the […]

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A couple of years ago, Stuart told me about a few metals related thefts in his area including his own 20 ton aluminum container worth about $60,000 (at the time). Stuart maintains an ownership stake in a specialist stocking company in the UK. Then, just two weeks later, a truckload of copper worth $100,000 was […]

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At the same time that respected Wall Street guru David Rosenberg, Chief Economist at Merrill Lynch declared that in his opinion the US is actually in the first month of recession, we came across a wonderfully upbeat report on the prospects for the world economy in Britain’s Daily Telegraph that we wanted to share with […]

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I’m not going to get into too many political discussions on this blog. I’ll leave that to my husband Jason Busch with his blog. But on a recent trip to NASA with our four-year-old, I couldn’t help but smile when our tour bus driver began discussing his pet subject, commercializing NASA innovations. Needless to say, […]

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I read a fascinating article the other day by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard for the Sunday Telegraph The Sunday Telegraph (the slightly stuffy Sunday edition of Britain’s best quality paper the Daily Telegraph). My father worked for them for 20 years and banned the reading in our house of any other newspaper – a rule that still holds […]

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A wise colleague once told me the first time you hear something, it’s a data point. The second time you hear it, it’s a line and the third time you hear it, it’s a trend. Said differently, the demand for the world’s precious raw materials is going to increase and so too will the prices.
Though […]

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Compounding changes to the China import/export tax and VAT rebate schemes in July of 2007, additional changes were announced on December 14 for implementation on January 1. With help from Jason Zhang, our metals expert in China, we review these changes and offer some early insight into the likely effects.
Broadly, there are three different changes […]

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Back in my Andersen days (yes, that Andersen), the firm had the motto “think straight, talk straight.” Not that we always did, but that certainly was the goal. My boss at Andersen, a wonderful guy named Jim Broering, had an even better motto: “Don’t make them yawn.” You laugh, but it had profound ramifications on what […]

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It’s easy to jump on the bandwagon of doom and gloom for the US economy. A falling dollar, a sub-prime mortgage mess, sluggish holiday retail sales and a whopping $9 trillion of national debt make it hard to conclude anything other than a recession for 2008. Since Q3, 2006 leading CEO organization Vistage has been […]

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