That happened just before the great stock market crash of 2008, and that is precisely what is happening once again right now.  On Thursday, the Bloomberg Commodity Index closed at 79.1544.  The last time that it closed this low was 16 years ago.  Not even during the worst moments of the last recession did it ever get so low.  Overall, the Bloomberg Commodity Index is down more than 28 percent over the past 12 months, and it has plummeted by more than half since mid-2011.  As a result of this stunning commodity collapse, extremely large mining companies such as Anglo American are imploding, giant commodity trading firms such as Glencore and Trafigura are in full-blown crisis mode, and huge portions of the global financial system are in danger of utterly collapsing.

In recent days, I have been trying to stress that many of the exact same patterns that we witnessed just prior to the great stock market crash of 2008 are happening once again.