We work with international partners to help bring about global agreements on commodity market regulation. We work especially with the G20 and EU Commission.
“Taken together, German financial institutions are responsible for one sixth of the total global investment volume in agricultural commodities, which is estimated by the Barclays Bank to lie at 99 billion US$ (68.8
billion EUR)”
From the English summary:
Banks and financial advisors in Germany have
been promoting agricultural crops as an
attractive investment category for the past few
years: rising food prices promise high returns
that no one should [Read More...]
On Wednesday Friends of the Earth Europe and Friends of the Earth France challenged BNP Paribas (BNPP)–a major player in global agricultural and energy markets, offering many funds and commodity-related investment instruments–over its role in food speculation and global hunger.
FOE challenged BNNP at its annual shareholder meeting in Paris. They told BNNP that given the severity of food crises around the world and the growing body of evidence that links excessive financial speculation to [Read More...]
DanWatch, a Danish independent non-profit media and research center, has reported that the Stockholm-based financial services group, Nordea, will remove food commodities from their financial products.
Nordea, a Stockholm-based financial services company, is Denmark’s largest provider of index based financial products in commodities.
When DanWatch and Tænk Penge in August 2011 inquired Nordea about the bank’s position on food speculation, the bank was conducting an analysis and was awaiting a conclusion later that year.
Now [Read More...]
Following last week’s announcement to terminate all guar seed and guar gum contracts, India’s commodity market regulator, the Forward Markets Commission (FMC), says that it plans to to lower position limits–cutting the number of contracts any trader can hold in agricultural commodities. These recent measures to curb excessive speculation came after India’s food minister ordered an investigation into volatile prices.
“The review will be done now and we will be consulting with the exchanges as [Read More...]
SOMO and WEED give an update on the EU’s attempts to regulate excessive commodity speculation in their latest newsletter.
Notable updates include a draft report by European Parliament Rapporteur on MiFID, Markus Ferber, which includes several amendments to the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID)–EU regulation that aims to curb excessive commodity speculation and improve the functioning of agricultural commodity futures markets. The proposed amendments address HFT more directly and forcefully:
Prohibition of direct electronic access to a trading [Read More...]
MarketWatch has reported that Deutsche Bank will not launch any new products in agricultural commodities this year due to concern that those products may interfere with global food prices. While Deutsche Bank still says that it doesn’t consider speculation to have a significant effect on prices, it says that it is taking more time to investigate the relationship between the two.
“We recognize that the proper functioning of agricultural markets have wide social ramifications. Therefore we [Read More...]
The new report “Speculative Bubbles in Agricultural Prices” from Professors at the University of Münster in Germany will be number 98 on our list of expert reports on the negative impacts of excessive commodity speculation.
Here’s the report’s abstract:
Motivated by repeated spikes and crashes in agricultural prices over the last decade, we investigate whether rapidly growing investment activities have triggered speculative bubbles on the corn and wheat market. From a technical point of view, [Read More...]
Reuters reported last week that EU lawmakers believe a draft European Union law that aims to crack down on ultra-fast trading and stop abusive positions in commodities needs “toughening up.”
The article notes that there is support across the political spectrum for toughening up HFT proposals and plans in the draft law to stop traders from amassing large positions that can influence food and energy prices.
EU lawmakers are also questioning the need for the [Read More...]
A recent Radio Netherlands Worldwide article connects food speculation and land-grabs as significant drivers of world hunger. Dr. Dirk Bezemer, Associate Professor of Development Economics at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, says, “The role of the West [in solving the food crisis] will diminish in the long term, but in the meantime Western countries can help by curbing food speculation” and ending land-grabbing.
Bezemer sees food and land sovereignty as the solution to hunger in [Read More...]
Wall Street Banks are now lobbying regulators to exempt overseas derivative trading arms from the Dodd-Frank Act, complaining that new regulations would leave their international arms at a competitive disadvantage.
Large banks, like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and others, have been meeting with regulators, testifying before congress, and writing comment letters whingeing about how regulations will stiffle their international operations.
“According to quarterly statements filed with the Federal Reserve, Goldman Sachs had 62 percent of [Read More...]
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