China is really worried at the speculative rise in the real estate prices across the nation in the last one year. The prices are over 50% higher in most of the cities due to availability of cheap bank financing since the beginning of this year.

Also China spend over 500 billion US dollars towards infrastructure in the last one and a half year, which increased the domestic demand levels. The Chinese banks raised up the new loan issuance by over 52% in the year 2009 which may turn into an uncontrollable asset bubble in the coming months / years. So the Chinese government has got into the act and cut down on further loan growth. We can only expect China to keep raising interest rates in the coming months also, if loan growth do not subside to respectable levels.

China has been helping out Japan, South Korea and even US in the last few quarters by importing more from those countries. And any drop in Chinese demand could well pull down the exports of their ailing countries, which they would not wish anyway.

In fact the economic recovery in Japan in the last quarter of 2009 has been due to surge in exports to China which may now come under pressure. US also might see a cut on their export oriented sector if China consciously cuts down imports in the coming months.

Crude oil prices always reflect the global economic scenario and in the last few weeks the prices have zoomed from below 69 dollars to around 75 dollars last week. The spike up in the crude oil prices have been primarily due to more than expected drop in US unemployment ratio, apart from higher consumer spending data. Also reports of some short term solution to the Greece debt issue, lead to increase in the crude oil prices.

Over the coming few months, we can safely expect crude oil prices to remain in the 65 dollars to 80 dollars band. A big US recovery coupled with some stability in Europe only can take the crude oil prices beyond 80 dollars, say analysts.

And China has slowly and steadily been becoming a major crude oil consuming nation not far behind Japan and Germany. And China has been hinting at slowing down the aggressive economic expansion through monetary measures in the coming months. That could in fact be a dampener for crude oil prices right through 2010.

If there is a recession in Europe due to the PIGS crisis this year, then that could also pull down the crude oil prices over the long term.

India carries the second largest population in the world, with over 110 billion people living in the country. And over 80% of the food production happens based on annual monsoon rains, which failed by over 15% during the middle of 2009.

That has resulted in shortage of food items including grains and pulses and also sugar. The government has been trying to import some quantity of food items from other countries but the kind of quantity India wants is not available in the market.

All these have resulted in the food prices going up by anything between 10% to 80% over the last six months. India is expecting the monsoon rains in 2010 to be normal or above normal, which in turn could pull down the food prices. Indian economy is also doing very well over the last few years, alongside China, which has helped in increasing the food consumption by over 30 billion people. Even a one session increase in food consumption by 10% of the population would mean a 3% to 6% increase in overall demand. And with Indian economy continuing to do well, we can only expect the food demand to keep rising in the coming years.