Raw Materials

Gold finished the trading year yesterday with its fifth consecutive annual gain, and it also had the biggest quarterly gain since September 2003. Futures for February delivery rose $1.40 yesterday, or 0.3 percent, to $518.90 an ounce on the Comex. The trading session ended early for New Year's weekend. A futures contract is an obligation to sell or buy a commodity at a set price by a specific date. "Gold is a hot commodity now, so more people, especially large hedge funds, are paying attention," said Billy Flahive, a trader at Island Trading Group in New York.

It's in everything from sandwich bags, microwaves and stereos to DVDs, cars and computers. Even the adhesive on shampoo labels and the caulking around bathtubs across America depends on it. Oil and natural gas are the base materials for chemicals and raw materials that show up in more than 90 percent of the consumer goods and packaging Americans take home from the mall. And just like the gas fueling American cars, those fossil fuel-based raw materials have gotten more expensive and harder to get in the wake of Hurricane Katrina as a result of the temporary loss of dozens of key chemical plants along the Gulf Coast.

Wall Street has been developing a better appreciation for classic smokestack businesses for the past two years, as the U.S. economy has revived and as China and other emerging economies have stoked demand for raw materials and all sorts of industrial goods. Lately, however, appreciation of commodity-related stocks has given way to near-panic buying. Some investors who paid no attention to these issues for a decade or longer - if ever - now seem willing to pay any price to get into them.

Spooked by inflation and searching for the next new thing, investors are putting a fresh spin on trading strategies and investments. Derivatives - from gold and oil futures to exchange-traded funds - were perhaps the hottest investment ticket in 2004. Futures trading in raw materials such as gold and crude oil shattered records in New York. Fueled in part by new products that appealed to smaller investors, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange saw its publicly traded shares soar more than 200 percent to become one of the 50 largest stock gainers for the year.

AKRON, Ohio - Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. said yesterday that it's eliminating about 10,700 jobs over two years because raw material costs are rising and carmakers are producing fewer vehicles. The 10 percent work force reduction is expected to reduce costs by about $150 million this year and help cut costs by $500 million annually by 2005. Goodyear took a fourth-quarter charge of $93.7 million, or 59 cents a share, for the job cuts and plant consolidations, resulting in a loss of $102 million, or 65 cents.

He asked and they told - but it wasn't easy. The government's official policy toward gays in the military may be "don't ask, don't tell," but for three years beginning in 1996, actor Marc Wolf interviewed 200 current and former members of the armed forces - straight and gay - their families, politicians and even the sociologist who wrote the policy. Many were wary at first. Some feared he was working for the military. "It took a while. I was an unknown actor from New York who had this sort of crazy idea," Wolf said last week at Center Stage where his one-man show, "Another American: Asking and Telling," launches this season's Off Center series on Thursday.

Q. I'm a frugal gardener and read that one could mulch landscape plants and garden beds with leaves that are run over with a mulching mower with a bag attachment. We have one of those very mowers but my husband insists on buying mulch because it looks better and he heard that leaves are too acidic and will hurt our plants. Can you please mediate this dispute? A. I won't touch the aesthetic question of which type of mulch is more attractive. It's true that fallen leaves are acidic. But they become neutral in pH after they are shredded and broken down.

It used to be that our economic fortunes were tied ever so closely to commodity prices. If prices rose too much, the economy slowed and the stock market slumped. And if they fell far enough, the economy accelerated and stock prices soared. That relationship between the prices of raw materials and the prices of stocks was even close enough to spawn a Wall Street aphorism: "Every bull market has a copper ceiling." On its face, that saying seems to make a lot of sense. Commodities -- raw materials such as oil or copper, or agricultural products like soybeans or wheat -- go into a lot of the products we buy. Plus, oil is used to make fuel or gasoline, which is needed to ship products to market via air or by truck.

The former Procter & Gamble site on 26 acres in Locust Point may change hands for the second time in two years. P&G vacated the waterfront site in 1995 and sold it a year later for nearly $7 million to A&E International Ltd., a Korean spirits maker that said it would manufacture Korean liquor there.Those plans never crystallized, and now Gerson P. Polun, a local architect and president of Fort Carroll Associates, a development company, said he has a contract for an undisclosed amount on the sprawling brick complex.

Even solid companies can slip up in a merger -- especially when it spans an ocean.Consider Philadelphia-based Crown Cork & Seal Inc., the big can maker and packaging company that paid $5.2 billion for CarnaudMetalbox SA of France about 2 1/2 years ago.European antitrust regulators delayed the combination for five months; the company misjudged a move by aluminum makers to raise prices; a rising dollar chewed into earnings; and a new rival stepped in to...