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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score on Friday was a mediocre 63-77-170 as the TSX Venture Exchange lost seven points to 640. If there were any late-to-arrive data, they did not alter Paul Zimnisky's rough diamond price index, and new data this week left his chart unchanged. And so, this week's fix sits at 123.1 points, the same as last week and down 1.7 per cent so far this year. Over a full year, prices are off by 17.3 per cent, and Mr. Zimnisky is now logging a 40.6-per-cent decline from three years ago, when his index set an all-time high of 207.3 points.

The diamond gloom has been building for more than a decade: Ten years ago this week, Mr. Zimnisky set his rough diamond price index at 159 points, about 22.6 per cent higher than today. Indeed, current prices are 11.7 per cent lower than the 139 points to which the index slumped in early 2020, just as the wheezing and coughing began emanating from Wuhan.

When Mr. Zimnisky began his index to start 2008, he pegged it at 100 points. That implies rough prices have gained an average of just 1.2 per cent annually while costs of production have risen about 3 per cent each year since then -- if not more. Over the past two decades, diamond miners, promoters and analysts were so sure that rosy days lay ahead that they built escalators into their projections -- boldly predicting that rough prices would outstrip inflation by up to 2.5 per cent per year indefinitely. Unfortunately, while the escalator may have been appropriate, it has been clacking along in the downward direction.

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