“The S&P GSCI commodities index is up 73% in the past 12 months,” writes Edward Hadas of breakingviews.com in The Wall Street Journal.
The author goes on to speculate about speculation, concluding, “This bubble could get bigger still.” Unfortunately, he assumes the S&P commodity index (which is shown in a graph) demonstrates a huge ongoing boom in the prices of commodities in general. In reality, all the index shows is that oil prices doubled over the past year and that most of that increase happened in the past four months. Energy commodities (mainly crude oil) account for 78 percent of the S&P GSCI commodity index.
The price of crude oil rose from $100 a barrel on March 4 to $136 on July 8, so the energy-dominated S&P GSCI index naturally soared too.
What happens to the widely reported “commodities boom” if you leave out oil? Look at The Economist’s index of 25 farm and industrial commodities, which excludes oil. The Economist’s commodity price index fell from 271.9 on March 4 to 265.6 on July 8.
It is on the basis of such fatally flawed evidence as the S&P commodity index that Congress has been trying to bully the Commodities Futures Trading Commission into bullying U.S. commodity traders to stop some sort of “commodity boom.”
The dollar was also quite stable during the past four months, contrary to numerous angry and overconfident Journal editorials about the alleged commodity boom being caused by the supposedly falling dollar. The Fed’s broad index of the dollar’s value was 95.97 on February 28 and 95.97 on July 8.
