Between September 2007 and June 2008, oil prices doubled, gold rose 30% and commodities, in general, advanced by a similar percentage.

So why, six months later, when prices have fallen back below last year’s levels, does everybody think they won’t rise again? The difficulties of extraction haven’t gone away, nor have the prospects of increasing consumption in the faster-growing emerging markets such as China. Yes, the prices of commodities are severely affected by marginal moves in supply and demand, but this is ridiculous!

Rest assured, commodities prices will rebound in the New Year. The reasons will soon become quite clear.

The decline in commodities prices since the summer is broad-based. The Reuters Continuous Commodities Index traded recently at 341, down 25% from a year earlier and off about 45% from its June high. At $48 a barrel, oil is trading at less than one-third of its June high. And gold, which appreciated less than other commodities in the spring, is still down 18% from the $1,000-per-ounce level it reached earlier this year.

Conventional wisdom blames the decline in commodity prices squarely on the global recession. Since the rise in demand from emerging markets – particularly the huge consumption bases of China and India – had caused the previous run-up, it seems natural that the absence of that demand growth would cause prices to decline. After all, that happened in 1982, when a deep recession in the United States spread to a number of other countries. Oil prices plunged from $40 a barrel to a mere $10, breaking the back of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in the process.

This time around, however, the math doesn’t seem to work. For one thing, the world as a whole is by no means locked into recession. We in the rich countries think of our economies as spiraling into a deep decline, but the reality is that we may only be witnessing a secular shift caused by the narrowing of income differentials between rich and poor countries as globalization proceeds.