Where next for commodities?

If the Great Depression was a consequence of a long experiment with a gold standard, the current economic policy framework – led by the US Federal Reserve and enthusiastically embraced by the Bank of England – is a mirror-like experiment with fiat currency. A gold standard limits the supply of cash in the economy to the quantity of gold in reserve. The current policy of quantitative easing (QE) is explicitly aimed at boosting the supply of cash. The likes of Paul Krugman and Ben Bernanke have argued that adherence to the gold standard inflicted a lasting and devastating deflation on t...