Did you notice the report last week that the project to replace Yankee Stadium has run over budget, to $1.3 billion?!  I like baseball a lot, and while I’m no fan of the Bombers, I agree that the venues ought to be worthy of the ticket prices. But how could anything we know about baseball be worth that sort of a price? My favorite team plays in a park that cost a “pitiful” $175 million when it was completed in 1994.

Inflation happens, I know, and some of New York’s other great landmarks probably seemed excessive in their time: the Brooklyn Bridge was built for $15.1 million in the 1870s and ‘80s. The Statue of Liberty cost $227,000 in 1886. The Empire State Building cost $40.9 million, and while it’s hard to fix a total price for the construction of Rockefeller Center, it was sold eight years ago for $1.85 billion, so the new Yankee Stadium will be “close.”

There are limits, however, even in New York, because recently the city halted plans for a grandiose transit center in Lower Manhattan, after the projected cost jumped $500 million over the initial estimate from three years ago.

What we’re seeing isn’t just the effect of exploding global demand for raw materials. It’s also the result of pricing advantage migrating to a dwindling number of players in the raw materials markets.

This week we learned that China has restored electricity that had been cut to 22 million homes, because the nation was running out of coal to fire its power plants. The shortage, compounded by historically bad winter weather, led the central government to shutdown a number of steelmakers indefinitely.

This week the Wall Street Journal reported that China has flipped from a net exporter to a net importer of coal, contributing to a worldwide demand surge for all grades of coal — even the formerly “dirty” varieties we rely on in North America, which Europe and other markets once spurned.

Iron ore is the other major ingredient in steel, and the International Iron & Steel Institute is growing more vocal with its concerns about monopoly conditions in the global seaborne iron ore trade; it wants regulatory authorities to properly investigate the proposed $147-billion merger of BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto Ltd., which would create the world’s second-largest corporation and a colossus in the mining industry: alumina and bauxite, coal, copper, iron ore, gold, manganese, and zinc, as well as diamonds and uranium, among other ores and minerals.

Just the prospect of this is influencing other companies, such as the electric steelmakers consolidating scrap brokers, in order to recover control over their raw material costs. Other consumers of steel scrap will now pay for the surplus, or face shortages, or both.

I wrote about these trends in a column late last year, which drew a lot response from readers. Most them were reacting to my general point — that such a company would answer to no one: not the U.S., EU, or China; not the WTO; maybe not even to investors. But, most of them seemed to miss the specific point: the rising costs of fuel and raw materials is driving up prices beyond any predictable point.

It doesn’t matter that the steel in the new Yankee Stadium may be coming from Indiana or Texas; fuel and materials respond to global demand conditions, even if wages and construction costs and real estate values are local, or regional. Everyone is paying the price, even if we don’t realize it. So, how many construction projects have to be canceled before a global monopoly responds to slack demand? And will that response be to cut prices, or shorten supply?