Some analysis on recent metals price trends

The Wall Street Journal on its "Real Time Economics"-Blog highlights some forecasts on metal price trends, based on a recent IMFdirect post from Rabah Arezki and Akito Matsumoto.
Bottomline, expect prices to remain low/trending downward for the foreseeable future as the period of high prices encouraged increase supply capacity which is now combined with lower demand, which in the case of metals is for an important part driven by the expected slowing of growth in China.

The IMFdirect post highlights that for oil the downward price trend is to a larger extent driven by the supply factor and for metals the price trend is more a factor of global (Chinese) demand. 

FT's Nick Butler: The reports are false – coal burns on

Nick Butler writes on the FT website and interesting note on the future of coal.

Writing on the headlines and recent divestment campaigns,

If you have Oxford University, Michael Bloomberg and the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund against you what hope can there be?

May I note an OxCARRE paper [ox.ac.uk] by Tony Venables and Paul Collier? In fact, he notes, how dominant coal still is, and likely to remain given the dependence of it in China and India.

He concludes that only a cheap renewable energy would be able to displace coal. That would imply serious energy put into science and research. Closing,

In the meantime, it would be prudent to start some serious consideration of the question of adaptation to the changes in climate that begin to look inevitable.

Beyond the curse: Policies to harness the power of natural resources

New VoxEU column by Rabah Arezki, Thorvaldur Gylfason, and Amadou Sy:

The presence of natural resources poses a number of potential economic challenges, especially for developing countries. This column argues resource-rich countries need to look beyond the so-called resource curse and put into action innovative policies and institutions to confront their many challenges and reap the benefits of widely shared natural-resource wealth.