Commodity prices across the board have been rising in the past couple of months. We don’t know how long this trend will last - that is, the trend towards higher commodity prices and lower asset prices - but we give it a while.

That’s why you should take advantage of a unique offer Kevin is offering new subscribers to Resource Trader Alert: 3 free months of his service - no strings attached!

But you only have until tonight at midnight. After that, the offer closes. Act now, time is running out!

*** In China, people are working their way up - from the rice paddies to the packing plant…from the country hovel to the urban tenement. Soon, they will be moving to the suburbs and buying SUVs. Wait…they’re already moving to the suburbs. The National Geographic has a photo of a new suburban development near Shenyang. There are houses that look like they might be in a suburb of London or New London - with white picket fences, lawn chairs and satellite dishes. And what’s this…there are so many rich people eating at fancy restaurants in Beijing that a chef in the city already makes about as much as a chef in Manhattan!

In America, meanwhile, people are working their way down. We’re not kidding. Wages are stagnant. Prices are rising. At the end of the day, they have less spending power; they are poorer. Besides, it said so in the New York Times. People lose their houses…move back in with their parents…and put their stuff in a storage unit. Then, they either can’t make the storage payments…or they realize that the move wasn’t just temporary and they give up. Pretty soon, the auctioneers are selling the stuff.

Of course, they didn’t really need all that stuff in the first place. But getting more stuff is what life is all about…isn’t it? So they got it, and now they have to get rid of it. If only they could hold a yard sale in China!

*** There is nothing like a national election to make you despair, sourly, of America’s future.

“Oh, I don’t like Obama,” said an American colleague on Friday. “He seems like a demagogue to me.”

The comment took us aback. It had never occurred to us that a candidate for president could be anything but a demagogue. Some are better at it than others, of course. But how could you hope to win the votes of the yahoos and cornballs without stirring their dull roots with the warm spring rain of patriotism, larceny, and the terrorist bugaboo?

“But Obama’s message is so empty…so vague… He promises ‘change.’ Who can choose a leader based on that kind of promise?”

As we’ve explained in these columns, change is the one thing almost no American wants. They’ve all got their little places at the beach staked out…heavily mortgaged, of course…and now they’re desperately afraid that someone - the Chinese, or the Arabs, or the Fed - is going to kick sand in their face.

Still they listen to Obama’s speechifying as they listen to music, without pay attention to the words. It gently lulls them, calms them, reassures them. They’re confident that Obama, if elected, will do what any of the others would do - try to prevent change at all cost.

The latest Las Vegas odds say that Obama will be the next president. All we know about the man is that he has Paul Volcker for an advisor, so he can’t be all bad. But what probably makes him more appealing then the other candidates is the very thing our colleague dislikes - the vagueness…the emptiness of his speeches…the hollowness of his remarks. Having said little; he has said little to annoy them.

Until tomorrow,

Bill Bonner
The Daily Reckoning

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