Metal thefts have been a problem for several years now, due to the high price of various metals.
But what's happening lately is something different. It isn't that the price of metals has taken a big jump. It's that the value of the dollar has taken a big drop.
Inflation - printing (or the bookkeeping equivalent) extra money dilutes the money already out there. This takes value from everything denominated in dollars (bank deposits, bonds, debts, anunities, insurance policies, parts of retirement funds, etc.) and gives it to those who get to use the new money first (typically financial institutions). It's a tax on dollars and anything denominated in dollars. (It also "readjusts" payment terms of existing contracts, lowering salaries and giving employers the opportunity to make that stick by doing nothing rather than raising them in proportion.)
These financial institutions made a LOT of bad housing loans, which started failing when the inerest rates climbed and the balloon-payments or interest-rate adjustemnts hit the sub-prime borrowers, compounding the problem by making housing prices drop as a lot of those houses went back on the market all at once. After a couple big institutions went belly-up the fed decided to bail out the rest and has "sped up the printing presses" - big time - drastically speeding up transfer of value to them and sucking it out of everybody else. This is some of that fallout. Then, with the dollar plummeting, foreign countries and big institutions are switching to other currencies, pushing it further down in good old supply/demand style. (Some of the oil producing countries are switching to the Yen and Euro for new contracts.)
An easy way to find out more about this is to start by Googling Ron Paul. This is one of his big issues (on which he's an expert). His (very clear) explanations and others' commentary about them will give you more links to experts on the subject and buzzwords for more searches.
Meanwhile, now would be a good time to look over your own investments and if you have too much in cash start moving some of it to other resources, like stocks and commodities.
