sutton038

Over the last year I've become somewhat intrigued by Glencore and other physical commodity traders. Part of that interest comes from my work on commodity speculation , and the fact that much of the analysis around that issue has focused on investment banks and hedge funds rather than the companies that actually deal in physical  commodities. Part comes from my fascination with figuring out how the global trade system works. Glencore has the added draw of being a notoriously opaque and secretive company, with a controversial and swashbuckling ex-captain who made a name for himself by doing deals that no-one else would do. Trying to figure out how their vast commodity operations work is a detective mystery if ever there was one. In May 2011 they went public and listed on the London Stock Exchange. That means they sold ownership stakes to investors via the UK market. Technically speaking though, they only sold about 12% of the company, and technically speaking, they're not base...

On Thursday I made my first appearance in the Ecologist , by all accounts one of the world’s leading environmental publications, founded in the 1970s. Yeah, airpunch! The subject of the article was food speculation . It sounds obscure, but concerns around speculation on agricultural futures have been seeping into the mainstream agenda over the last few months in the context of rising global food prices. There is rising suspicion that the activities of financial players in commodity futures markets could have a distorting effect on futures prices, and thus that food price increases might be linked to computer algorithms running in some hedge fund in Mayfair. WHEATBIX FUTURES Having had experience in the world of derivatives, I’m always prepared to accommodate the idea that irrational behaviour in financial markets could distort prices. That said, I’ve remained cautious about populist arguments about why speculation must necessarily be a negative force. Thus, in late 2010, I attended a ...