The Peak Oil movement has widely spread its message about an impending peak in global oil production, caused by an inadequate resource base. On closer scrutiny, the underlying analysis is inconsistent, void of a theoretical foundation and without support in empirical observations. Global oil...

Oil prices in 2008–10, measured in constant money, were almost eight times the level of 1970–72. The prices of minerals and metals, another exhaustible resource group, increased by a mere 45% in the same period. The paper contends that the actions of OPEC, primarily production quotas, cannot...

In a recent article (Tilton et al., 2011), we argue that even when investor stocks are declining an increase in investor demand can cause a commodity's price to rise, a conclusion that is both contrary to conventional wisdom and counter-intuitive. In his comment on our article, Olle Östensson...

This, our second reply to Östensson, supplements our earlier more technical analysis with a simple intuitive explanation of how investor demand can be driving commodity prices higher even when investor stocks are falling.

A continuously expanding group of commodities are being priced on commodity exchanges. This paper explains the causes to the increasing preference of exchanges as pricing instruments. It also provides the detail of the shift in the 1970s and 1980s from producer determined prices to prices set by...