Special Unit on Commodities

See Chapter III- Managing the financialization of commodity futures trading. This chapter highlights the effects of the financial crisis on commodity markets, describing recent fluctuations and reasons for the “financialization” of commodity markets. The strong and sustained increase in primary commodity prices between 2002 and mid-2008 was accompanied by a growing presence of financial investors on commodity futures exchanges. This “financialization” of commodity markets has raised concern that much of the recent commodity price developments was largely driven by financial investors’ use of commodities as an asset class.