Grab Red-Hot Metal and Mining Stocks

Editor's note: Jon D. Markman writes a weekly column for CNBC on MSN Money that is republished here on TheStreet.com.

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In the category of weirdest financial news stories of the year, Philippine food conglomerate San Miguel announced this week that it plans to spin off its 117-year-old namesake brewery and use the proceeds to expand into mining.

Chairman Eduardo Cojuangco said the new underground venture, along with investments in infrastructure construction and real estate, would be the company's "new engines of growth."

Now think about that for a moment. If you can't make money selling ice-cold beer in a tropical steambath like Manila, you probably aren't the shiniest 7-iron in the golf bag. So you almost certainly don't belong in the cutthroat world of metals and mining. Yet such is the fervor today among executives of major industrial companies to grow faster, bigger and stronger through investments in basic materials.

It's almost as if ores the world over are casting a magnetic spell over boardrooms, luring otherwise intelligent managers to throw shareholder funds down holes in the ground and into blast furnaces that not too long ago were considered the last places any sane executive would wish to invest.

Have companies gone mad, or have the rules radically changed?

By the looks of the premiums that are being paid for rock and refining assets lately, it looks like we've actually got a whole new rule book, as governments in Asia, Eastern Europe and South America throw off the chains of centralized economic control and allow local entrepreneurs and mayors to industrialize and urbanize at breathtaking speed.