**6. The commodities trend: gold and energy**

Gold and energy are interlinked to the financial system as a payment system and investment. The integration of the volatility of both commodities influences the business cycle within the demand and the investment. Using the band pass filter, we are aiming at removing the low frequencies of data. **Figure 5** shows the data for real non-oil commodity prices such as the gold price and the oil commodity price such as crude oil.

#### **Figure 4.**

*The financial cycle for the global stock market. Source: Own study.*

#### **Figure 5.**

*The cycle of the gold price and the crude oil price with band pass filter. Source: Own study.*

The blue line shows the cycle of the crude oil, and the dashed red line shows the cycle of the gold price.

For the energy crude oil, according to **Figure 5**, we can discern eight peaks, 1986, 1990, 1997, 2001, 2006, 2008, 2012, 2014, implying a peak-to-peak average cycle length of around 5 years. However, related to the gold we realize that the number of peaks is different to the crude oil. We can discern four peaks, 1984, 1994, 2004, 2014, implying a peak-to-peak average cycle length of around 10 years.
