The Kondratieff Wave

Nikolai Kondratieff, an economist in charge of the Russian Agricultural Bureau (Institute of Conjuncture) in Moscow in the mid 1920's, who undertook empirical exercises in commodity price data going back to the mid 1700's for European and the American economies. He found a clearly discernible cycle in the prices of the commodities that he studied, averaging 54 to 60 years in duration; roughly 25 years up, 30 years down...
high prices; 1790 to 1819, 1840's to 1863, 1896 to 1921
low prices; 1820 to mid 1840's, mid 1860's to mid 1890's, mid 1920's to 1950.

and extrapolating; high prices, 1950 to 1975, low prices 1976 to late 1990's, high prices again, late 1990's to 2025 or so.

See more:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUXwei_3-Zg&feature=plcp
(The Kwave info completes in part 2)

read more:
That Kondratieff (highly prescient) speech to the Solar '95 conference, Hobart, 1995,
and scroll right to the bottom, "Energy and the Tax Base; Implications for Solar Power" second part of the presentation.

e-book;
(forthcoming, expected January 2013)

Note for readers; in my view, much of the material on the web about the so-called Kondratieff commodity price wave is either misleading or plain wrong. Much of the material suggests we are in a price wave 'winter', or Kondratieff's thesis is used to explain all sorts of social phenomena. Kondratieff himself only used the material as a study of commodity prices, nothing else, then detailed a little of what happened on each side of the wave, but never really offered a hypothesis as to why we see these long wave price cycles except that he thought it may have something to do with the effects of war. It is hoped to address this issue in the e-book.