Boom
A commodity price bubble, known as the 2000s commodities boom, was created following the collapse in the mid-2000s housing bubble. Commodities were seen as a safe bet after the bubble economy surrounding housing prices had gone from boom to bust in several western nations, including the UK, USA, Ireland, Greece and Spain.
The renewed interest in coal by China's and Taiwan's energy companies and the rise of alternative power sources like wind farms helped modify coal prices over the 2000s.
Chlorine price steadily increased throughout 2007 and early 2008 as demand for P.V.C. and some metals like copper, Neodymium and Tantalum rose due to the increased growth of the BRIC countries' demand for electrical goods. Russia increased production, but the US offset this with production cuts in the late 1990s and mid-2000s.
Phosphorus, rhodium, molybdenum, manganese, vanadium and palladium are used in high grade steels, oil based lubricants, automotive catalytic converters, chemical plants' catalysts, electronics, TV screens and in radio isotopes. Demand for these metals appeared to be increasing as computers and mobile phones became more popular in the mid to late 2000s. Thulium is used in x-ray tubes and Neodymium is used in high strength/high grade magnets.
Molybdenum, rhodium, neodymium and palladium are relatively scarce metals, while manganese and vanadium are, like phosphorus and sulfur, fairly abundant for minor minerals. The major metals such as iron, lead and tin are commonplace.
Recycling of the aluminum, ferrous metals, copper fractions, gold, palladium and platinum in mobile phones and computers had got under way by the mid-2000s. Battery recycling has helped bring down both the nickel and cadmium prices.
Sulfuric acid (an important chemical commodity used in processes such as steel processing, copper production and bioethanol production) increased in price 3.5-fold in less than 1 year while producers of sodium hydroxide have declared force majeure due to flooding, precipitating similarly steep price increases.
Read more about this topic: 2000s Commodities Boom
Famous quotes containing the word boom:
“The cohort that made up the population boom is now grown up; many are in fact middle- aged. They are one reason for the enormous current interest in such topics as child rearing and families. The articulate and highly educated children of the baby boom form a huge, literate market for books on various issues in parenting and child rearing, and, as time goes on, adult development, divorce, midlife crisis, old age, and of course, death.”
—Joseph Featherstone (20th century)
“California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)