Price speculation impacting food supplies

The Guardian has a story in which head of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Joachim von Braun, says tighter regulation is needed to ensure speculators don’t cause an artificial demand in global food markets. He says if regulation is not tightened, prices would increase excessively and the risk of malnutrition would increase. He was [...]

Speculators accounted for 71% of oil contracts of the NYMEX

Reuters have obtained statistics from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) which shows that speculators accounted for 71% of the benchmark oil contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), the world’s largest for energy trading, as of April 2008. The story also looks at what impact the proposed regulation by CFTC chairman Gary Gensler could [...]

Goldman Sachs speak out on proposed CFTC regulation

Reuters has a story in which Goldman Sachs chief financial officer David Viniar says the bank’s energy trading is hedging and should be exempt from proposed U.S. government limits on the volume of contracts that speculators can trade. READ HERE