The absurdities of the European system of sugar subsidies are highlighted today in a New York Times article. Rampant fraud and corruption plague a byzantine system of rules and regulations created to support a program that primarily benefits large multinational corporations. Because of the subsidies, consumers in the European Union pay an average retail price of $0.63 per pound, while the global average is only about $0.36 per pound.
The historical trend of the European wholesale import price can be studied in further detail in our commodities section. Click on the graph below to manipulate and download the data.
The historical commodity prices section has been updated with numbers for August 2009.
Estrenamos una nueva sección en español: series de precios históricos para una multitud de mercancías (commodities) incluyendo productos agrícolas, insumos industriales, metales, petróleo, gas natural, etc. La fuente es el Fondo Monetario Internacional.
Twenty five years of zinc price history put the recent rise and fall of the price of a metric tonne in perspective.
Play with the data, now updated with February 2009 prices, by clicking on the graph.
I just finished uploading January 2009 data to the historical commodity prices section. I noticed right away that the sharp fall of all commodity price indices that started in July 2008 seems to have stopped sometime between December of last year and January of this year. Take a look at the overall Commodity Price Index for example.
One data point does not a trend make, but January 2009 looks a lot better to commodity producers than December 2008.
One final note: February 2009 data will be available in approximately 30 days. I follow the IMF release schedule, which is not fixed.
Our 15-year oil price index chart shows that oil prices in November of 2008 are roughly equal to the oil prices of November 2005. The graph also shows that there was a small spike in prices in 2006, followed by a large spike that began in January 2007 and peaked in July 2008.
A 25 year chart showing the changes in the IMF oil price index puts recent changes in the price of crude oil in perspective. The chart below, showing the oil price index since November of 1983, displays the impressive run-up that started around July of 2007.
I just updated the historical commodity prices section with the latest IMF data. Historical data for 8 price indices and 49 commodities now includes June 2008 numbers. I’m including a chart showing that the aggregate commodity price index, i.e. the index that tracks energy, metals, food, and raw materials, continued its upward march in June. It increased 5.7% with respect to May 2008, 32.6% with respect to January 2008, and 62% with respect to June 2007. Inflation has clearly become a serious problem around the World.
Click on the image above to play with the data
Today I released two improvements to the commodity prices section. First, all price tables can be exported to Excel by clicking on a link located directly below the last row of each table (Example: Commodity Price Index from 1993 to 2008)
Second, the entry page now contains a graph showing the main commodity price indices.
I hope you find these two new features helpful. Your comments and feedback are welcome.