Regardless of which newspaper or journal you read, it seems to be one story after another about the relentless record commodity price highs often in the face of fundamentals that suggest the market should be going in the other direction. We feel tin may be one metal that has peaked and will be on its […]

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A friend and colleague of mine recently made a very interesting observation about global trading. She said to me, “Lisa, if you think of importing as a privilege, it will be a lot easier to deal with the nonsense that our government subjects companies to.” My friend’s comment seems very poignant particularly after reading this […]

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Those with long memories in the magnesium industry may recall the last major price rally magnesium went through back in 1994/5. That rally had been sparked by Dow Chemical’s unexpected announcement of the closure of their US facilities. The price peaked around $2.30/lb only to fall back to $0.60-0.80/lb in the following years. Consequently, new […]

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It is hard to believe that we are coming up on the close of the first quarter of 2008. What a quarter it has been! We thought it would be fun to review our predictions from the beginning of the year and grade ourselves. At the same time, we will chime in with what we […]

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The German manufacturing sector has been enduringly robust over the last 30 years. Even recently, a developed mature economy which still generates a lot of its GDP from manufacturing has proved extremely resilient in the face of persistently high European Central Bank interest rates and rising raw material costs. Much of this is down to […]

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What a difference a day makes, or so the song goes. In this case it has been a couple of months since our last Cobalt post on January 16. At that time, Cobalt had reached $40/lb. and was widely tipped to top $50/lb during the year ahead. Here we are just three months into the […]

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A few weeks ago we wrote about an anti-dumping petition for mattress innersprings brought by Leggett & Platt. Here is the five second overview: Leggett & Platt, along with these firms, Hickory, Sealy, Simmons, Spring Co., Symbol Mattress filed an anti-dumping petition alleging the US innerspring industry has been materially harmed by imports from China, […]

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There has been an awful lot of coverage, both here and in more famous columns (you notice I didn’t say better just more famous) about commodity price increases. You can’t open a newspaper or turn on the TV without seeing yet another record high price for precious metals, or agricultural products, or steel. But we […]

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We have written a lot over the last few weeks about the macro-economic situation the world’s metal markets find themselves in so it came as pleasure to connect with an old friend of ours Dan Kendall, President of ABC Metals to hear about life at the sharp end. ABC is a distributor of high quality […]

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Which would you prefer, a diamond or a sapphire? (sapphire) Which would you give your wife, gold or silver (silver)? Despite the fact that gold reached that $1000/ounce threshold last week, the yellow metal is still far away from its all time inflation adjusted high back in 1980, ($850/ounce in 1980 dollars) according to this […]

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