Base metals were mostly down on Tuesday. Copper fell 0.68 cents to close at $2.4374/lb. Nickel dropped more than 21 cents to finish at $7.1320/lb. Zinc lost three-quarters of a penny, ending at $0.7357/lb. Aluminum added less than a quarter of a cent, closing at $0.7634/lb., while lead moved to $0.7493/lb., down more than a penny from the previous session. Copper retreated a bit yesterday capping a six-day rally that pushed the red metal to a nine-month high on Monday. Speculation that demand will slacken in a seasonal slowdown in China had much to do with the drop in prices.

China imported 378,943 metric tons of refined copper last month, a 12% increase from May and the fifth straight record, customs office data showed yesterday.

“Demand should ease after builders filled orders for the summer construction peak and the margin between China and London prices narrowed,” said Pang Ying, an analyst

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By Martin Hutchinson
Contributing EditorMoney Morning

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India remains a …

India’s weekend election gives the ruling Congress Party a big win and paves the way for economic reforms.

India’s ruling Congress Party has a goal of helping India’s poor and pushes free-market reforms.

After this election, India is apt to open up its retail, insurance and banking sectors to more foreign investment.   Moreover, the government may reduce its ownership in refineries, banks and fertilizer companies.

This election could pave the way for a large amount of capital to flow into Indian stocks.

Bombay Stock Exchange stocks are taking off as investors look optimistically at a critical election victory for the Congress Party-led alliance.

The best way to play India: PowerShares India (NYSE: PIN). This Exchange Traded Fund holds a nice basket of Indian stocks and seeks to mirror the Indian stock market measured by the Indus India index.

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Yesterday, we saw articles and interviews alternately asserting that China was the leader, that Brazil was the leader, and that the US was the leader. None of those headlines gave enough information for a discriminating audience to put the data and the assertions into an overall context.

Your job as an investor includes being aware of your time frame, the time frame in the news references you read or hear, and to carefully parse the information to avoid being confused or misinformed.

Let’s look at this issue with respect to the relative price performance (not total return, which includes dividends) of the US and the BRIC markets using StockCharts.com index data:

US – S&P 500 (index symbol $SPX)
Brazil – Bovespa (index symbol $BVSP)
Russia – Russian Trading System (index symbol $RTSI)
India – Bombay Stock Exchange (index symbol $BSE)
China – FTSE/Xinhua 25 (index symbol $FXT)

The table below ranks each country index from 1 through 5

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India’s central bank yesterday (Monday) unexpectedly lowered its base lending rate for the first time since 2004 – a move that signals that India Reserve Bank Governor Duvvuri Subbarao sees weaker growth and the credit crisis as bigger threats than inflation in Asia’s third-largest economy. The Reserve Bank of India cut its overnight lending rate from 9% to 8%, according to a government statement issued in Mumbai yesterday. The “surprise move” that came days before a regularly scheduled meeting of its policy board came after India’s central bank reduced the cash reserve ratio by 2.5 percentage points to 6.5% – retroactive to Oct. 11, Bloomberg News and MarketWatch.com both reported. The so-called “repurchase rate” is the discount rate at which India’s central bank lends money to commercial banks to infuse liquidity into the market. India’s rupee ...

Inflation is no loger the greatest threat to the short term health of the Indian economy. The global credit crunch has now taken over poll position on the list of worries which are likely to determine the evolution of policy over at the Reserve Bank of India. India's inflation continues to slow and hit a four-month low at the start of October, giving the central bank room to keep injecting cash into the financial system without fanning prices.Wholesale prices rose 11.44 percent in the week to Oct. 4 from a year earlier after gaining 11.8 percent in the previous week, according to data from the commerce ministry last week.

Weaker price gains and a shortage of money in the banking system have allowed the central bank to shift its focus from fighting inflation to stimulating an already slowing economy.

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Inflation is no loger the greatest threat to the short term health of the Indian economy. The global credit crunch has now taken over poll position on the list of worries which are likely to determine the evolution of policy over at the Reserve Bank of India. India's inflation continues to slow and hit a four-month low at the start of October, giving the central bank room to keep injecting cash into the financial system without fanning prices.Wholesale prices rose 11.44 percent in the week to Oct. 4 from a year earlier after gaining 11.8 percent in the previous week, according to data from the commerce ministry last week.

Weaker price gains and a shortage of money in the banking system have allowed the central bank to shift its focus from fighting inflation to stimulating an already slowing economy.

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by Edward Hugh: Barcelona India is in the middle of a storm at the moment, there can be no doubt about that. But the important point to note is that this storm is not of India's making. The financial turmoil in a number of key developed economies, and above all the United States, is sending shock waves across the global economy, and as is normal, when the earth trembles, it is the most fragile who notice it most. India's economy may be fragile in the sense that it is very vulnerable to what is colloqially known as global risk sentiment, but it is not fragile in terms of being susceptible to having its growth trajectory knocked completely off course. India may be shaken, but her economy will not be broken. Emerging Market Bonds Emerging-market bonds had their worst week in four years this week as the deepening credit crisis raised global recession concerns ...

by Edward Hugh: BarcelonaIndia is in the middle of a storm at the moment, there can be no doubt about that. But the important point to note is that this storm is not of India's making. The financial turmoil in a number of key developed economies, and above all the United States, is sending shock waves across the global economy, and as is normal, when the earth trembles, it is the most fragile who notice it most. India's economy may be fragile in the sense that it is very vulnerable to what is colloqially known as global risk sentiment, but it is not fragile in terms of being susceptible to having its growth trajectory knocked completely off course. India may be shaken, but her economy will not be broken.Emerging Market BondsEmerging-market bonds had their worst week in four years this week as the deepening ...

India's inflation held steady in the week to September 13, rising 12.14 percent from a year earlier, thus maintaining the same pace as in the previous week. The rate has now been trending slightly down from the recent peak of 12.63 percent hit on the 9 August. If this trend continues it should give the central bank the necessary room to hold borrowing costs unchanged and thus avoid placing funding pressures on a banking system which is struggling in the wake of the most recent bout of financial turmoil in the United States.

India's financial system is evidently showing signs of strain as the impact of both local policy tightening and the global credit crunch steadily take hold. The rate at which Indian banks lend to each other climbed to an 18-month high of 15.125 percent on Sept. 19, following the

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