Commodity prices recovered some ground on Tuesday, after the previous session’s sell-off, led by rising crude oil and base metals prices, but sentiment remained cautious.

Edward Meir, of brokerage MF Global in New York, said that the commodities market had been discounting a V-shaped economic recovery since March and warned that recent economic indicators had been “quite erratic”. The fragility of the recovery was highlighted by the US natural gas market, where prices were near a 7-year low.

Analysts warned that some investors, sitting on top of large gains from commodities bets made earlier this year, could still sell in the near term to lock in some profits. The spot S&P GSCI, the commodities index, has surged 27.6 per cent since January.

Francisco Blanch of Bank of America Securities-Merrill Lynch is one of the biggest advocates of the view that oil prices helped push the world into recession. In an FT column he expands on how we got here, and how there has been an underlying shift in the relationship between oil and the rest of the economy. And why, by extension, another rise in oil prices could be so much worse for developed economies.

The run-up in prices, he says, was mostly due to the relative disinterest in commodities investment during the boom years:

The largest rise yet in global commodity prices and the most pronounced credit collapse in history occurred in the same quarter, in that precise order, for a reason. During the previous decade, investment capital failed to go into commodities to facilitate productive capacity expansion and went instead into other sectors such as property.