This article came from The Gold Report website: http://www.theaureport.com/
Jack Lifton is a Senior Fellow of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security.
I am beginning the writing of this article on a plane, flying from Singapore to Tokyo, Japan. I arrived in Singapore six days ago from Sydney, Australia. I fly to Madagascar and Germany in August, and then Beijing and Baotou, China in September. Between overseas trips (I live in the Detroit area), I will travel to Toronto, Montreal, Labrador, Canada and Washington, DC, New York City and various locales in Alaska, U.S.
I am not trying to impress you with my frequent-flyer status. I want to establish my credibility as an observer of and participant in the global metals economy. And I want to establish that credibility, so I can give you a truly global overview and, I hope, perspective on the metals’ markets economy with an emphasis on individual metals, related groups of metals and all of their present- and future-use trends.
This undertaking, of course, will require more than one article; so, in this one, I am going to introduce the topic and discuss it in general. Here and over the next year, I will write about the detailed markets for the most critical metals in particular; but this month I want to focus on two metals-related issues that have surfaced and become prominent in the news in this first decade of the 21st century: