The fear is that a jump in prices will squeeze profit margins as the cost of commodities, goods, and transportation spikes up.
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The materials to make plastics have been particularly high in recent months due to a general rise in the cost of commodities.
Such efforts notwithstanding, Josef Schmidhuber, an agronomist at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, argues that Brazil's competitive advantage lies in churning out huge quantities of low-cost bulk commodities.
That the dollar cost of commodities from wheat to meat to soybeans all skyrocketed alongside oil signaled that far from a problem of scarcity, commodities were becoming expensive thanks once again to a weak dollar.
"The cost of world commodities, including sugar and wheat, rose even more quickly, inevitably working through to some shop prices, " he added.
Using the Goldman Sachs Commodities Index as a proxy for the costs of mining (because it is heavily weighted towards industrial commodities), the real cost of mining gold jumped by nearly 50% during this period, explaining why gold stocks did not provide the leverage that gold investors expected.
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Only IBM, with its huge mainframe and services businesses, seems able to defend itself as Dell turns once-profitable products into commodities and forces competitors into a cost-cutting game they cannot win.
However, since 2008, the ratio of gold to commodities has surged, slashing the real cost of mining gold by over 60%.
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Among those spread across many commodities, experts highlight two low-cost exchange-traded funds.
Producers, whose cost structures include any of these commodities, which to some degree include everyone, will stumble badly.
EU, put some of these commodities on the world market at half their production cost.
The actual cost, in real terms, of many commodities has declined over the past four decades when measured in constant dollars.
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Consumers are already being hit by rising prices, as the the higher cost of importing oil spills over into other commodities.
When prices for commodities rise, it is usually because of either a change in the cost of bringing the product to market (increasing fuels could do that), the cost of capital, or an imbalance between supply and demand.
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If successful, this could lower the cost of entry into the mobile-telephone business and turn handsets into commodities, much like PCs are now.
When fuel prices rise, the cost production and transportation rise, putting upward pressure on the prices of other commodities.
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Jason Britt, president of brokerage firm Central States Commodities, called it "a step in the right direction" and believed the CME could recoup any cost in extra volume if confidence among clients improves.
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