One year horizon:
Category Archives: commodities
Guest Contribution: “Why Commodity Prices May Have Peaked”
Today, we present a guest post written by Jeffrey Frankel, Harpel Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and formerly a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. A shorter version appeared at Project Syndicate.
Will Commodity Prices Continue to Sustain Inflation?
Commodity price indexes through June have turned down, excepting energy. Front month futures prices suggests a further abatement of upward commodity price pressure, including in energy.
Gasoline Prices Continue to Fall
Why is no mystery:
Gasoline Prices Today and (Maybe) Tomorrow
Assuming futures contract prices for gasoline are useful predictors for future gasoline prices:
Did Oil Prices Start Rising when Biden Started His War on Fossil Fuels
A reader writes:
I estimate (don’t kinda think) that a large portion of today’s inflation is due to environmental policies, in particular the war on fossil fuels.
IMF World Economic Outlook Forecasts
The entire IMF April WEO is out, with analytical chapters on private debt/global recovery, greener labor markets, and global trade and value chains. The forecasts are revised downward, at global and at national levels, for certain countries:
Inflation and Energy Prices
It’s belaboring the obvious that gasoline (and energy prices) had a big impact on headline inflation [BLS release]. M/m inflation was at Bloomberg consensus of 1.2%, while core was below, at 0.3% vs. consensus 0.5%. However, it’s useful to see how over time exactly how much headline and core diverged.
Farm Income – 2021
Net income up, government support down.
“[I]t’s a big IF that soybeans futures are LONG TERM predictors at all”
That’s a quote from an Econbrowser reader who is almost uniformly wrong on all matters related to economics, but it seems useful to me to provide the empirical evidence on futures as predictors, especially as noted in a recent post rising commodity prices have put upward pressure on inflation rates. Further, with the efficiency of futures markets might have changed over time, with greater financialization.