Quoted from SealClubber:The cost of raw materials has risen dramatically now that China is buying a good chunk of our recyclables and raw material. People are stealing copper from the walls of buildings. A penny now costs more to make than it is worth.
This is out of date information. Last week copper futures made a new six year low. Oil is collapsing (again) after a deadcat bounce the last coupla months. China is slowly collapsing, perhaps only back to a place where things began to get nutty anyway, but a very real world-impacting decline in raw demand. This is a serious problem as we all got used to "cheap outta China" and they all got used to having steady jobs in factories instead of working to the bone in a field and then still (nearly) starving to death. Baltic Dry Index is falling into oblivion, this index measures bulk shipping rates...too many ships and not enough cargo demand = "operating at a loss" pricing. Some/any of this can stall or even reverse, I have no crystal ball, but the global trend is very much deflation not inflation. That NIB pinball keeps going up is an anomaly to the trend.
