The half-carat is priced like 1999, says Kiran Gems

§1A manufacturer prices the shelf.

The claim was made on a trade panel rather than in a release, and it is the sharpest thing said about polished prices this week. Senil Lakhani, president of Kiran Gems USA, told Rapaport's Heard on the Street that diamonds below one carat and up to 1.5 carats are less expensive than ever before and are selling at prices from the 1990s and early 2000s. He put the range that matters at 0.30, 0.40, 0.50 and 0.70 carats, calling those sizes "the bread and butter for America," and placed the money at $1,000, $2,000 and $5,000 rather than the half-million and million-dollar stones that get photographed. The episode was published on 12 August. Kiran Gems is one of the largest diamond manufacturers in the world, so this is the cutting floor talking about the shelf.

This paper has been reporting the same goods from the other end all month, and the two accounts fit together only if you separate level from direction. The RapNet index had 0.30-carat goods up 1.6% and 0.50-carat goods up 1.8% in July against a flat one-carat, published here on 4 August, and yesterday's colour split had K to M goods averaging 1.7% against 0.1% for better colours. Those are monthly moves. Lakhani is describing where the price sits, not which way it went, and a 1.6% month on a price that has fallen back to a 1999 level is a very small repair on a very long decline. The bread-and-butter stone is priced where it sat in 1999 and is rising at under two per cent a month, and both halves of that sentence have to be read together or the trade will mistake a floor for a recovery.

§2Level and direction are not the same fact.

The same panel produced the answer to a question this paper has circled for weeks, which is whether traceable origin is actually available or merely announced. Jeff Angel, head buyer at RDI Diamonds, said he can find a diamond of traceable Botswana origin in about five minutes, and that he recently filled a million-dollar order in which every stone had to come from Botswana. That is a different picture from the one the compliance conversation paints. Origin is not a shortage at the buying desk for anyone who asks for it; it is a search that a professional buyer already knows how to run. What has not arrived is the part where a retailer can put that fact in front of a customer without building the story themselves, and the panel spent its time on exactly that gap.

§3Origin, in five minutes.

The limits of all this should be stated plainly, because a panel is not a data series. No index this desk can reach publishes a 1999 comparison for 0.30 to 0.70-carat goods, so the level claim cannot be checked against a price history the way a monthly move can. What can be checked is the direction, and the direction agrees with him. The claim also comes from a manufacturer, which is the part of the chain with the least to gain from suggesting polished is cheap, and that cuts in favour of taking it seriously rather than against it. This desk is reporting it as a named executive's characterisation of his own market, not as a price, and is not putting a figure on 1999 that it cannot source.