Everybody knows there is some kind of food crisis. Grocery prices are painful. Wal-Mart has rationed rice purchases. Mexico has had tortilla riots due to corn prices. Rice riots have occurred Asia. China introduced laws prohibiting conversion of human food crops to fuel.

However, who would have predicted a 5 standard deviation price move for an index of 60 foods, or a 16 standard deviation move in rice prices. No, that is not a typo. Bloomberg today reported a UN Food Crisis study and related price charts revealing this food Black Swan.

At the core of the definition of Black Swan is an unpredictable and unexpected price move that is way off the chart in terms of standard deviations from the mean.

Since 3 standard deviations theoretically encompasses 99.7% of all observations, 5 to 16 standard deviations is a shocker.

We’ll have to rely on businesses and

...

Speaking of Romania the Slovakian koruna will be no more as Slovakia has been accepted into adopting the euro starting Jan 1, 2009 (save for a potential snag or two). I don't know a lot about Slovakia but the bigger macro for these countries is smaller, faster growing, cheaper labor, younger population than the European old gard makes them generally attractive as an investment destination. IndexUniverse is reporting that there will be two platinum related ETNs from ETRACS listing very soon, one will go long platinum and have ticker PTM and the other will go short platinum with ticker PTD. This chart compares the platinum product from ETF Securities in the UK versus GLD (client holding). The basic case for platinum as I understand it is there is less of it than gold and it gets consumed for industrial ...