Diamond News Archives

(IDEX Online) – The World Federation of Diamond Bourses (WFDB) has announced that the 2018 World Diamond Congress, the biannual meeting of the WFDB and the International Diamond Manufacturers Association (IDMA), will take place in Mumbai, India, during the latter part of October.

This year’s Congress was due to take place in Tel Aviv from June 19 to 21.

WFDB President Ernie Blom said: “At our last Executive Committee meeting in Antwerp last week, our colleagues from the Bharat Diamond Bourse kindly extended an invitation to host the 2018 Congress in Mumbai. The Congress will take place towards the end of October, and the final dates will be communicated as soon as possible.

“On behalf of the WFDB and the IDMA board, we would like to thank our colleagues in Mumbai for their kind invitation, and we look forward to meeting all the WFDB and IDMA presidents and their delegations, as well as members of the entire diamond pipeline. I would ask industry members to leave their busy schedules free in the last part of October to be able to attend this important Congress.”...

 Irresponsible jade extraction has led to extensive human suffering and environmental degradation in Myanmar’s conflict-affected Kachin state. The use of heavy mining equipment, manufactured by companies such as Caterpillar, Komatsu and Volvo Construction Equipment, has enabled extraction to take place at an unprecedented speed. A Swedwatch report finds that the companies rely on insufficient human rights safeguards regarding risks associated with the use of their equipment.

Since the early 2000s, jade extraction has levelled mountains and deforested vast areas of intact forests in the state of Kachin, Myanmar. The mining comes with severe adverse impacts for local residents; seemingly thousands have lost their access to land and livelihoods, and hundreds allegedly die every year in landslides and flooding caused by negligent jade mining practices. The jade trade is also intimately linked to an ongoing armed conflict which has marred Kachin for almost 60 years.

The level of mining witnessed in Myanmar over recent decades would have been impossible without the use of foreign heavy mining equipment, sold by local distributors, dealerships, or smugglers. Many of the customers are reported to have close links to the Myanmar military – one of the parties in the armed conflict in Kachin – and to the former military junta which repressed the country for decades. But although the problematic jade extraction is enabled by use of machines from companies such as Caterpillar, Komatsu and Volvo Construction Equipment, the three companies are not able to demonstrate adequate awareness of how their products are used, or of the impacts they leave behind....

Federal Reserve officials are trying to figure out whether they will need to raise interest rates high enough to slow U.S. economic growth in the coming years, or if they can stop before the higher borrowing costs start to bite, Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari said.

The debate about whether the current level of U.S. unemployment might be too low to keep inflation stable and therefore necessitates tight monetary policy is "a very honest assessment of the confusion" among central bankers at the moment, Kashkari said in an interview airing Thursday on Bloomberg Television.

"I would be comfortable with us moving to a neutral rate -- not stimulating the economy, but not also constraining the economy -- and once we get to neutral, let’s just wait and see how inflation evolves," Kashkari said.

The confusion reflects uncertainty over a relationship between unemployment and inflation that was posited by Milton Friedman in the 1960s and has guided central bankers ever since. The idea is that when the unemployment rate falls below its so-called natural rate, which can’t be observed directly and therefore must be estimated, inflation will accelerate until the unemployment rate goes back up to the natural rate.

It’s the central bank’s job to make the unemployment rate go back up to stabilize inflation if necessary, by raising interest rates above the so-called neutral interest rate, which also must be estimated. The uncertainty -- which has arisen because unemployment has continued to fall without putting much upward pressure on inflation -- is casting doubt on whether that will be necessary.

"Once we get to neutral, are we going to go beyond neutral, and does the data -- does the wage growth, does the inflation data -- actually support...

ALROSA, the world's largest diamond mining company, offers fans to choose a "football" name for large rough diamond weighing 76.53 carats. This stone will become the core of a "football" collection of special size rough diamonds to be auctioned in Moscow. The winner will receive a ticket to the final game of the FIFA World Cup 2018. The ideas of fans are accepted on a website www.diamondsofrussia.ru. The winner will also receive a certificate that the fact of extraction of the stone is named after his idea.

A crystal weighing 76.53 carats was mined at International kimberlite pipe in March 2018. It is a stone of octahedron shape with yellowish tint and dimensions of 29.05 x 28.29 x 25.33 mm.

A football diamond, which received a unique name, will become the core of special size diamonds collection (weighing over 10.8 carats) that will be sold at an auction in Moscow, started on June 25. The results of the auction will be announced on July 30. There are also 33 large diamonds in the collection besides the main stone.

"FIFA World Cup 2018 is a landmark event for the fans not only in Russia, but all over the world. It has just started, but has already given people a lot of positive emotions and many unexpected turns. We believe that the diamonds from this collection will be of particular interest to our customers, since these are not just stones, but the story behind them," Evgeny Agureev, Member of the Executive Committee, Director of the USO ALROSA, said.

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