Q: You've been ringing alarm bells about commodity prices. Why all the worry?
A: They came down for a hundred years by an average of 70 percent, and then starting around 2002, they shot up and basically everything tripled—and I mean, everything. I think tobacco was the only one that went down. They've given back a hundred years of price decline and they gave it back between '02 and '08, in six years. The game has changed. I suspect the game changed because of the ridiculous growth rates in China—such a large country, with 1.3 billion people using 45 percent of the coal used in the world, 50 percent of all the cement and 40 percent of all the copper. I mean these are numbers that you can't keep on rolling along without expecting something to go tilt.
via wsj.com