JEFFREY CARTER: Commodity Prices on a Tear.

The main market for Nickel futures trades at the London Metal Exchange. Don’t try to trade them, because they suspended trading. A Chinese company had a huge short and had to get out. That added a lot of pressure to a market that was already on its way to the moon. They are still sorting things out as I write this.

For what it is worth, nickel is an essential element in the battery of an electronic vehicle. The other is lithium. Most of that is mined in China although they found a huge deposit in Nevada. Of course, the Green movement wants the lithium in Nevada to stay in the ground yet they agree with Buttigieg that we all should be buying electric cars. Green people are out of touch with reality. When the wheel was invented in the Stone Age, they’d have kept dragging things around.

Nickel’s rally, and the reliance on Russia for supply is going to make electronic cars a lot more expensive. Stainless steel just got a lot more expensive too. How many things does stainless steel go into?

As an old dinosaur commodity trader, I checked out some of the hard-core ag markets to see what they have been doing. It will be no surprise to astute readers of this blog that the prices across the board are higher than they used to be. Principally, you can blame the level of government spending for that increase. Inflation happens when there are too many dollars chasing too few goods. The Fed printed dollars, and the Federal government helicoptered them into the pockets of Americans. That guaranteed inflation. Biden’s Build Back Better would increase the rate of inflation, not decrease it.

Two quick ways to decrease inflation are to increase interest rates and really drop the level of government spending. The second will work better than the first.

Can’t do that, it would interfere with graft.

Plus: “By the way, that jump in wages from $10 to $15 got eaten up by inflation.”