Wall Street Journal graphic
One of our core hypotheses is that global economic inclusion--driven in part by trends such as India and China moving one billion people into the cities by 2030--will drive global commodity prices to very high prices.
Today's Wall Street Journal captures that trend in this report: "The High Cost of Raw Materials," by Liam Pleven.
Bill McKibben, writing about his latest book, Eaarth, said that the effects from climate change are not future threats but are already our reality. Today's WSJ article about raw materials provides more evidence that we are already in the grip of inclusion-driven price spike.
The good thing is that high commodity prices are a price signal--telling the market that innovation to create alternatives to the current way of doing things are profitable. The challenge for Washington is to shape the markets so that this kind of innovation is possible and that market volatility does not dampen the signal. We're not there yet.
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