It seems like only five months ago we were talking about thieves stealing wire and metal from anywhere they could find it, especially building sites. Come to think of it, it was five months ago. How quickly times change!

Today, the bottom has fallen out of all commodities, including copper and even oil. There are few, if any, building sites around. The only commodities still in demand are precious metals, gold and silver. If this trend persists, people will be dumping scrap metal in the desert just to get rid of it.

“Commodities followed the euphoria cycle that we had along with housing,” said Robert J. Shiller, an economist at Yale who specializes in market bubbles. “We had the idea that the world is growing very fast, people are getting very rich and, by the way, we are running out of everything. That theory doesn’t seem so good when the economy is collapsing.”

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The market seemed to be sending mixed signals for a while. Soaring prices of everything encouraged production. New mines opened, oil drillers went to the farthest reaches of civilization and beyond looking for crude. Supplies were in demand, prices rose and supply increased. It looked like we might be headed for an inflationary blow off.

Now – now – the markets have been turned upside down. Petroleum stocks are backing up in the lines. Prices are falling quickly. Last week, crude was less than $45 per barrel.

Iraqis say the “proper” price for oil is $80. Saudis say the price should be $60. But the market was saying the price should be $45. And $45 it is.

People were blaming the oil companies when gasoline prices soared. Politicians were driven to talking about punishing them. Today, gas prices are below $2 per gallon everywhere in the contiguous United States. No one is congratulating oil companies or offering them rewards.

But part of the drop in demand for oil must be attributed to conservation. People stopped driving as much as they did. They stopped buying gas guzzlers. In fact, they stopped buying cars completely waiting for the environmentalist dust to settle.

The heads of the so-called Big Three automakers drove to Washington, D.C., in their cars instead of flying in on their Gulfstreams. Next time, they might ride in on horses.

Now gas is relatively cheap, but car sales are still stagnant. So in an arcane way, environmentalism has reduced the demand for energy in most forms, depressing the search for new supplies of old energy and new supplies of new energy. Thus was the pressure reduced to allow drilling offshore and in ANWR (the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern Alaska), to build new nuclear plants, even to plant new windmills. We seem to have enough energy all of a sudden.

Politicians, to whom we always turn in times of distress, are baffled. They claim to be omniscient but in fact most of them know little about anything but getting elected. Why we would turn to them is only a triumph of political marketing over experience. All of the latter shows they make bad things worse. And today is no exception.

If you think there are “experts” out there somewhere who know what to do, you have been suckered by the politi-think campaign. They are mere historians at best. They may know what happened in past financial crises and they try to extrapolate it to today. But that’s not good enough. History doesn’t repeat itself in exactly the same manner.

The last recession wasn’t managed on multi-port chips (or whatever they call them). Everyone was not issued a cell phone at birth. Children today text before they talk.

It’s a brave new world out there – well, maybe not so brave but decidedly new. And the old fixes of the problems may not work as well as they used to. Our politician-geniuses are trying mightily to inflate our way out of a gathering deflation. The effort to ward off deflation by pumping imaginary money into the economy has not proved rewarding yet. In fact it may just make it worse.

I have lived through several inflations big and small. I have never lived through deflation and neither have most of us today. So for many, we are in uncharted waters, we are as ignorant as our experts. No one knows exactly what to do. It’s more a case of “lets start throwing switches and see if any of that helps.”

We are managing to prop up the economy day by day, but the economy is sinking faster than we can bail out the financial boat.

And yet, many people had enough money to spend on essentials like flat screen TVs that one man was killed and a woman injured who came between shoppers and merchandise. On the opposite coast, a gun battle broke out in a store over the right to buy a toy.

That doesn’t sound deflationary to me. Is that a hopeful sign or are people throwing away their last dollars before they become worthless? I can’t help thinking it’s the former.

Without the tender ministrations of our omniscient experts and politicians, the market would probably sort it all out in short order. But I trust them to turn a recession into a depression. That’s history, too.

Contact Lionel Waxman at territorial@waxmanmedia.com or visit his website: www.waxmanmedia.com. Lionel Waxman’s Flashpoint commentaries are published in The Daily Territorial.