Category Archives: Commodities

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

When writing about fluctuations in the price of commodities, you can now use our graphs to illustrate your point. For instance, take a look at the graph below. It shows the IMF Commodity Price Index (for all commodities) for the past fifteen years.

Commodity Price Index - Commodity Prices

The index has increased by 281.93%!

You can draw you own conclusions, but the important point is that embedding our graphs is now as simple as copying and pasting a bit of HTML code. Clicking on the graph will let you explore other time frames or choose a different price index or commodity.

Historical Price of Bananas

A very interesting article about bananas in the NY Times mentions the rapid rise of prices for what has been one of the lowest-priced fruits in the US. I decided to use the new commodity prices section to investigate how much prices have changed over the past twenty five years.

Over the past six months, the price of Central American and Ecuadorian bananas has increased by 43%. Between May of 2007 and May 2008 the price increased by 19% (the price peaked in March of 2008). A five year time frame shows an appreciation of 198.9%, while a 25 year time frame shows a price increase of 83.89%. There is significant volatility in the price of bananas. The lowest price within the past 25 years was USD 250.51 per metric ton in June of 1994, while the highest was USD 1027.36 in March of 2008.

United States Oil Imports

The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) has detailed data about US Crude Oil imports by country of origin. I used their data to create a chart showing US imports of crude oil and other petroleum products from 1993 to 2005. The chart shows that the top exporter of crude oil to the US is Mexico, followed by Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. If all goes well I will be adding similar charts to IndexMundi for easy visualization of oil & gas production, supply, and distribution data.

US Oil Imports by Country of Origin