Garnet: Correlation
Prices it moves with, and why
Industrial garnet is a hard mineral sold as blasting abrasive and waterjet cutting grit, mined from beach sands and hard rock in Australia, India, China and South Africa. Mining bans on Indian beach sands reshaped supply. Prices are private.
No public price Garnet has no public monthly price series: Sold by grade on private contracts; no public monthly price series.What its price moves with
Garnet is a natural abrasive that competes with manufactured grits such as aluminium oxide and slags. Its demand and price behave like other abrasive grains, tied to metal fabrication and surface preparation work.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Silica sand was the traditional blasting medium, but health rules on silica dust in many countries have pushed users to garnet. Where silica is still allowed, cheap sand caps garnet prices.
No public price for silica sand, so the link is explained in words only.Beach sand garnet is separated along with ilmenite, rutile and zircon. When Indian authorities halted private beach sand mining, garnet exports fell along with those minerals, and Australian supply gained.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Zircon is a key co-product of the same mineral sands operations. The economics of zircon and titanium minerals decide whether these deposits are mined, and garnet comes along as a by-product.
No public price for zirconium, so the link is explained in words only.Shipyards and offshore platforms use garnet blasting to strip and prepare steel surfaces before painting. Shipbuilding and repair activity is therefore a direct driver of garnet demand, and busy shipyards in Asia are among the largest buyers.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Steel fabricators, tank builders and bridge painters use garnet blasting, and waterjet cutting of steel uses garnet grit. Fabrication activity tracks the wider steel and construction cycle, so garnet orders rise when infrastructure and industrial building projects are busy.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.How to read these numbers
Correlation of monthly changes (the number in the coloured pill) compares how much each price moved, month by month, since 2006 or the first month both series exist. It runs from −1 to +1: near +1 the two usually rise and fall in the same months, near 0 there is no link, and a negative number means they tend to move in opposite directions. Above 0.7 is strong, 0.4 to 0.7 moderate, 0.2 to 0.4 weak.
12-month changes compare year-on-year moves, which shows whether two prices share the same cycles even when the month-to-month noise differs.
Price function is a straight-line fit of the two prices on logarithmic scales: price ≈ k × (partner price)β. β is how much this price moves, in per cent, for a 1% move in the partner over the whole period, and R² is the share of the variation the fit explains. Two prices that both drift up with inflation can fit well without any real link, so read it together with the monthly correlation.
Lead or lag checks whether the monthly correlation is clearly higher when one price is shifted by 1 to 6 months.
Correlation is not cause. The reasons on each card explain the economic link; the numbers show how strongly it has shown up in prices. Proxy series are US producer price indexes or related prices and can blur the real link.
Data: World Bank Commodity Price Data (Pink Sheet), October 2026; US Bureau of Labor Statistics producer price indexes, IMF primary commodity prices and US EIA prices via FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, retrieved November 2026. Calculations by this site.