De Beers Pulls "Last Resort" Price Cut As Diamond Price-Floor Crumbles
(www.zerohedge.com)
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How can something based on CARBON be scarce?
Same question applies to oil of course.
But sheep will be sheep.
Because it is formed and is found only in very specific volcanic formations. And DeBeers meters the supply. Diamond is also the hardest known substance (excluding possibly boron nitride), so it does not wear. At least not as much as we do. It also has a high refractive index and chromatic dispersion, which makes for brilliant stones if cut properly.
Yes of course it's rare due to what is required for it to form. But rare is not necessarily scarce, especially with technological development.
There was a time where rubber was scarce because it came from trees in Java. Now synthetic rubber is everywhere.
The germans had synthetic oil production from coal during WW2.
In this day an age, scarcity of a carbon based component is mostly artificial. Obviously a diamond cannot be as plentiful as a piece of coal, even though they're the same element; but it's also not as scarce as DeScaams wants you to believe.
What makes a rare diamond is size, clarity, color and cut; a one carat round cut 'D" color and VVS1 or IF (internally flawless) are rare-size is everything in diamonds..
We were discussing natural diamonds. Yes, I am familiar with synthetic counterparts in this and other products. But we were primarily concerned with scarcity as a market condition (scarcity/supply vs. demand), and that has long been a feature of the DeBeers monopoly, to limit the market scarcity by metering. The market really doesn't function according to what we believe; it functions according to supply and demand, as do all markets, be it in diamonds or daffodils.