Judg­ing by the way that com­modi­ties prices have lit­er­ally been "drawn and quar­tered" since July, its obvi­ous that the mar­ket has been forced into liq­ui­da­tion by the mas­sive unwind­ing or rather de-levering caused by the near fail­ure in the credit mar­ket, and the assump­tion of debt by gov­ern­ments and cen­tral banks around the world.

Gold, notably, has traded lower dur­ing this anom­alous selling-spree, even though it has long been regarded to be the real asset choice of those want­ing to pro­tect against finan­cial risk. Per­haps its sim­ply either that gold is highly liq­uid at a time of great need and is being sold off, or there has been a sub­stan­tial amount of cen­tral bank inter­ven­tion by way of short­ing gold in the futures mar­ket. Either way, given the sheer amount of money sup­ply growth, by con­trast, gold is very cheap. Which brings us to plat­inum. Take a look at these charts:

Plat­inum, which is 30X rarer than gold closed at $793, only $83 pre­mium to the price of gold. At peak ear­lier this year, plat­inum traded at a $1,300 pre­mium to gold.

Oil is con­tin­u­ing to get cheaper. OPEC held an emer­gency meet­ing, agree­ing to cut pro­duc­tion by 1.5 –mil­lion bar­rels. News of this had no effect on oil prices, not even an inter­me­di­ate effect; it closed on Fri­day at $64.15. Which begs the ques­tion: Is OPEC really a cartel? They seemed con­tent to sit back and watch glee­fully as the price shot up to 147, but have been unable to do any­thing to stop its slide to cur­rent lev­els, not even a sub­stan­tial cut in pro­duc­tion. Or so it seems.

Is the immi­nent food cri­sis over? Are fears of oil short­ages overwrought?

Right now, it looks like nobody cares. They just want their money out, and at any price.

As War­ren Buf­fett has put it so elo­quently in his recent NYTimes Op-Ed piece, Buy Amer­i­can. I am, "Be fear­ful when oth­ers are greedy, and be greedy when oth­ers are fear­ful. And most cer­tainly, fear is now wide­spread, grip­ping even sea­soned investors."

Charts: Bespoke Invest­ment Group

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