 The robust growth of emerging market economies (EMEs, such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China), beginning in the 1990s, "propelled commodity markets into a supercycle".The size and diversity of commodity markets expanded internationally,
and pension funds and sovereign wealth funds started allocating more capital to commodities, in order to diversify into an asset class with less exposure to currency depreciation.In 2012, as emerging-market economies slowed down, commodity prices peaked and started to decline.