Get Back to Those Gold Soundz

…as the price has stayed above $1,300 all month, Reuters reporting on big-money investors buying physical gold "by the ton," and Howard Ruff pointing out this list of commodity price inflation that threatens looming retail price inflation (though he gives the reader not a clue as to over what time period these percentage price rises have occured):

For example, Agricultural Raw Materials are up 24%, The Mineral Index is up 25%, The Metals Price Index is up 26%,Coffee is up 45%, Barley is up 32%, Oranges are up 35%, Beef is up 23%, Pork is up 68%, Salmon is up 30%, Sugar is up 24%, Wool is up 30%, Cotton is up 40%, Palm oil is up 26%, Hides is up 25%, Rubber is up 62%, Iron Ore up 103%. Those are prices at the wholesale level.

As Reuters reports, a lot of the buying may be less inflationary expectations or protection but merely the usual leaping of dumb money into whatever seems to be going up:

Anthony DeChellis, managing director of Credit Suisse's Americas private banking unit, said at the Reuters summit in New York that clients are more interested in capitalizing on the rise in gold prices than using the precious metal as a safe-harbor investment.

"They're asking, 'If it's a bubble, how far can I ride that bubble,'" he said. "I cannot say we've seen a spike in gold interest, but there's an interest in the phenomenon of it."

I appear to like blogging about gold.