Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Commodity futures are not evil
My column in Business Standard today is about recent calls for a ban on commodity futures trading.
4 comments:
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ReplyDeleteSorry if I confused you. Let me show the steps slowly.
ReplyDelete1. Bad news arises about a future harvest.
2. Speculators process this news and buy futures; this drives up the futures price.
3. This widens the basis between spot and futures to go to levels outside the "no-arbitrage band".
4. Now there are opportunities for spot-futures arbitrage. The arbitrageur gets a locked-in fixed income return by (a) buying on the spot, (b) selling the futures and (c) storing goods for delivery at the future date.
5. This tends to (a) drive up the price today, (b) push down the price at a future date because (c) stocks have gone up. All these are the "exactly correct" responses that you want to kick in when bad news about harvest date appears.
One bigger issue apart from these futures markets, is the relevance of a spot market and the price determination process. If you visit any of the mandis is shocking the way the cartels decide the price of the produce.
ReplyDeleteWould strongly recomend that you visit the lawrance road mandi in delhi.
Further, never has the government ever bothered to correct the pricing mechanism in the mandis as it suits them ( they get around Rs 2500 crs from these mandis) . Futures are just being used as the political tool , its very unfortunate.
Would be great if you can also read my pages at
golderharvestindia.blogspot.com.
Mr. Ajay i too was disappointed when commodity futures were banned in future and the reasons you have given perfectly support my line of thinking. I feel that futures reduce the risk of producers from the losses and protects consumers from high prices in case of supply shortage to some extent.
ReplyDelete