Speech
Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000: testimony before the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, U.S. Senate, September 8, 2005
Parkinson, Patrick M. (2005)
Speech , Paper 129

Journal Article
Commodity futures index trading and spot oil prices
Gavin, William T. (2012)
Politicians, market participants, and economists have argued about whether the increased trading induced by the growth of index funds over the past decade is a cause of high commodity prices.
Economic Synopses

Journal Article
Index funds: hedgers or speculators?
Gavin, William T. (2008-07)
National Economic Trends , Issue Jul

Report
Commodity prices, commodity currencies, and global economic developments
Groen, Jan J. J.; Pesenti, Paolo (2009)
In this paper, we seek to produce forecasts of commodity price movements that can systematically improve on naive statistical benchmarks. We revisit how well changes in commodity currencies perform as potential efficient predictors of commodity prices, a view emphasized in the recent literature. In addition, we consider different types of factor-augmented models that use information from a large data set containing a variety of indicators of supply and demand conditions across major developed and developing countries. These factor-augmented models use either standard principal components or ...
Staff Reports , Paper 387

Journal Article
What explains the growth in commodity derivatives?
Gavin, William T.; Basu, Parantap (2011-01)
This article documents the massive increase in trading in commodity derivatives over the past decade?growth which far outstrips the growth in commodity production and the need for derivatives to hedge risk by commercial producers and users of commodities. During the past decade, many institutional portfolio managers added commodity derivatives as an asset class to their portfolios. This addition was part of a larger shift in portfolio strategy away from traditional equity investment and toward derivatives based on assets such as real estate and commodities. Institutional investors? use of ...
Review , Volume 93 , Issue Jan , Pages 37-48

Working Paper
Evaluating the forecasting performance of commodity futures prices
Reeve, Trevor A.; Vigfusson, Robert J. (2011)
Commodity futures prices are frequently criticized as being uninformative for forecasting purposes because (1) they seem to do no better than a random walk or an extrapolation of recent trends and (2) futures prices for commodities often trace out a relatively flat trajectory even though global demand is steadily increasing. In this paper, we attempt to shed light on these concerns by discussing the theoretical relationship between spot and futures prices for commodities and by evaluating the empirical forecasting performance of futures prices relative to some alternative benchmarks. The key ...
International Finance Discussion Papers , Paper 1025

Working Paper
Does speculation affect spot price levels? the case of metals with and without futures markets
Korniotis, George M. (2009)
This paper finds no evidence that speculative activity in futures markets for industrial metals caused higher spot prices in recent years. The empirical analysis focuses on industrial metals with and without futures contracts and is organized around two key themes. First, I show that the comovement between metals with and without futures contracts has not weakened in recent years as speculative activity has risen. Specifically, the annual and quarterly price growth rates of the two metal categories have been positively correlated with their growth rates experiencing a structural shift by the ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2009-29

Journal Article
Monetary policy, bubbles, and goldilocks
Anderson, Richard G. (2011)
Monitoring of prices is essential lest future adjustments be misunderstood by the public as part of the dynamics of aggressive monetary policy.
Economic Synopses

Speech
Brief remarks: a speech at the Interstate Interchange Dedication Ceremony, Dillon, South Carolina, March 7, 2009
Bernanke, Ben S. (2009)
Speech , Paper 447