Yet despite that and a long upward march of commodity prices, the hard-assets industry has not really attracted much of an aura.

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World stock and commodity markets were hit hard overnight due to the ongoing European Union sovereign debt crisis that has intensified this week.

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Their unconventional nature makes it hard to compare binary options with regular commodity contracts.

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It was also hard to refute the suggestion that the commodity cycle would keep rolling.

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That high exchange rate has made it hard for Brazilian companies not involved in the booming commodity sector to compete.

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The real miracle economy in the South Pacific is, of course, Australia, which simply sailed through the Asian crisis and the world commodity-price slump, which has been hard on its mineral exports.

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"Weak commodity prices have hurt both of them really hard, which makes it all the more important for them to have someone favorable to their interests sitting as a president in 2014, " says Dr. Yohanes Sulaiman, a political science lecturer at Indonesian Defense University.

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If you agree, put 10% of your money in a hard-assets stock fund (see table below) or in some commodity positions you place yourself at a broker.

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"The market is having a hard time making a bullish case for oil, " said Hussein Allidina, head of commodity research at Morgan Stanley.

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Such a move by the Fed should be gold and commodity-market bullish, as it would not only make the returns on hard assets more appealing, but it would also likely put some downside price pressure on the U.S. dollar index, or at least limit its upside movement.

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