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Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject Economics - Finance, grade: 1,0, University of Münster, language: English, abstract: This seminar paper reviews the literature on futures markets as well as the recent food crisis and presents an empirical investigation of the influence of (index) speculation on the corn price. My findings are in line with most of the other empirical conclusions that, rather than speculation, factors from the real and monetary economy played a role in the spike of commodity prices. For centuries, corn has been one of the most produced crops in the world, used to feed people, livestock and machines. During the last quarter of the twentieth-century, world food prices declined by more than 50 percent, thereby improving the nourishment of people all over the world. However, this extensive decline also raised calls for protectionist policies, aimed at defending the welfare of commodity producers. Starting in the early 2000s, all classes of commodities have experienced hefty price increases. The price for corn increased by more than 250 percent in roughly three years (2005-2008). The resulting food crisis devastated low-income communities around the globe, with the already large part of their income they spent on food becoming even more substantial, causing hunger and malnutrition. While a variety of explanations for this crisis have been offered, some were quick to blame excessive (index) speculation.
Since the mid 2000s, an increasing financialization of commodity futures markets is taking place. This has fueled an ongoing discussion about the effect of financial investments on the development of commodity prices. Against this background, the trading activities of financial speculators also come to the fore. There is the concern that such speculators can cause irrational overshootings of agricultural commodity prices, e.g. in the event of global production shocks. In such an event the decrease of total supply induces a price surge menacing food security in developing countries. Yet, the question emerges whether speculation aggravates this price increase, eventually inducing a price bubble. The relevance of this concern is reinforced by the fact that due to climate change an increased frequency and severity of global agricultural production shortfalls is at stake. If speculation evokes an additional threat to food security in the event of a production shock, the political agenda should not be confined to focus solely on the adaptation to climate change. Instead, it is then also necessary to address speculative activities on agricultural commodity markets. This book scrutinises whether speculative bubbles can be identified in the event of severe global production shocks. For this, a framework for tracing the transmission of the futures price's development on the spot market is developed. Using annual data from 1979-2012 for maize it is analysed whether production shock related price bubbles occurred.
Commodities have become an important component of many investors' portfolios and the focus of much political controversy over the past decade. This book utilizes structural models to provide a better understanding of how commodities' prices behave and what drives them. It exploits differences across commodities and examines a variety of predictions of the models to identify where they work and where they fail. The findings of the analysis are useful to scholars, traders and policy makers who want to better understand often puzzling - and extreme - movements in the prices of commodities from aluminium to oil to soybeans to zinc.
Commodity futures prices exploded in 2007-2008 and concerns about a new type of speculative participant in commodity futures markets began to emerge. The main argument was that unprecedented buying pressure from new "commodity index" investors created massive bubbles that resulted in prices substantially exceeding fundamental value. At the time, it was not uncommon to link concerns about speculation and high prices to world hunger, food crises, and civil unrest. Naturally, this outcry resulted in numerous regulatory proposals to restrict speculation in commodity futures markets. This book presents important research on the impact of index investment on commodity futures prices that the authors conducted over the last fifteen years. The eleven articles presented in the book follow the timeline of our involvement in the world-wide debate about index funds as it evolved after 2007. We also include an introductory chapter, new author forewords for each article chapter, and a lessons learned chapter to round out the book. Policy-makers, researchers, and market participants will find the book not only functions as useful documentation of the debate; but, also as a natural starting point when high commodity prices inevitably create the next speculation backlash.
This thesis employs monthly data over 1995-2012 which identify measures of speculation in the corn futures market to test whether speculative activity and excessive speculation, as measured by Working's T index, cause spot price changes. Additionally, data over 2006-2011 analyse whether speculators like hedge funds and swap dealers have a negative impact. Little evidence is found that speculators destabilize the corn spot market. The empirical analysis employs Granger causality tests and Impulse response functions. The results suggest that only excessive speculation has very small effect, which reduces the changes in corn spot prices, and the close investigation into the role of different futures traders is consistent with the traditional theory, according to which speculators provide liquidity to the market rather than destabilize it. It is further argued that the diversion of corn for the production of biofuels significantly contributes to the increasing price changes in the corn market in the long term. A case study is developed to study the import-export corn relationship between Mexico and the United States. It is found that it is not financialization but rather increasing demand for biofuels that causes increasing prices and brings food insecurity in import-depending developing countries such as Mexico.
"The conference was organized by the three editors of this book and took place on August 15-16, 2012 in Seattle."--Preface.
Fluctuations of commodity prices, most notably of oil, capture considerable attention and have been tied to important economic effects. This book advances our understanding of the consequences of these fluctuations, providing both general analysis and a particular focus on the countries of the Pacific Rim.
This paper elalobrates on the question whether speculative capital invested on commodity futures markets has an effect on staple food, on corn in particular, between 2006 and 2008. Effects as such amount to increasing prices for this type of grain, which may be the cause for the worldwide hunger crisis. Diese Studie geht der Frage nach, inwiefern Finanzspekulationen an den Warenterminbörsen für Grundnahrungsmittel, respektive Mais (corn), die weltweite Hungersnot zwischen 2006 und 2008 ausgelöst haben, bzw. eine Mitschuld daran tragen.