Compliments to the Bank of Japan, for keeping it real.
While the Federal Reserve continues to pretend its easy money policies aren’t juicing commodity markets, the BoJ isn’t afraid to acknowledge the obvious. Colleague Kevin Kingsbury alerted us to this commentary issued by the BoJ last week titled: “Recent Surge in Global Commodity Prices – Impact of financialization of commodities and globally accomodative monetary conditions.”
And if anyone knows a thing or two about accommodative monetary conditions, it’s Japan.
The report certainly gives credit to global economic growth for pushing up commodities, but it also says “speculative investment flows into commodity markets have amplified the intensity of the price surge.”
Here’s a sentence from the summary that should have Bernanke, Dudley and other deniers at the Fed turning crimson: “Furthermore, globally accommodative monetary conditions have played an important role in the surge in commodity prices, both by stimulating physical demand for commodities and driving more investment flows into financialized commodity markets.”
