Rice rationing redux?  Chris Mayer on the return of rising food prices… Dan Amoss on what the Fed says versus what the Fed does… Russia sings dollar’s praises, dollar bulls stampede… Chuck Butler looks past the rhetoric… China’s latest resource grab… Iraqi oil… America’s best-selling car… with an MSRP of $60…

We begin a new week pondering the question that bedevils the conscientious market observer every day.Inflation? Deflation? Or as Agora founder Bill Bonner is wont to suggest, both?

“Inflation – rising prices, or a drop in the purchasing power of the dollar – will soon rise to the very top of economic concerns,” writes Chris Mayer. “I can’t understand why there are pundits who insist we can’t have inflation while the economy is weak. There are plenty of examples of weak economies with high inflation. After all, I don’t think they are hitting on

Above is a graph of various commodity ETFs. The main ticker is UNG (United States Natural Gas Fund), a ETF which tracks prices of natural gas delivered at Henry Hub. OIL is the iPath Oil ETN. JJA is the iPath Agricultural Commodities ETN.  JJM is the iPath Industrial Metals ETN. And, JJP is the iPath Precious Metals ETN. The chart displays the year-to-date performance of these various commodity indexes and it’s plainly obvious that one stands out among the others. Generally speaking, non-energy commodities have been on an upward trend since the beginning of the year and in fact would have provided mid-to-high teens returns just in the last few months! Even oil, though down precipitously in the first