Monday, October 17, 2011

"Hedge Funds Add to Commodities Wagers"

Let's think about this.
Money flowed into commodities during QE2.
Commodities started dropping a month before the end of quantitative easing.
Operation Twist began on Wednesday September 21.
Commodities started turning up
Here's Bloomberg's chart of commodity price indices:


Commodity Futures Chart

Paul Krugman is nuts when he said the Fed didn't cause food price inflation.

From Bloomberg:
Speculators boosted their wagers on higher commodity prices for the first time in five weeks as increasing confidence that the global economy will avoid another recession spurred the biggest rally of the year.
Money managers boosted combined net-long positions across 18 U.S. futures and options by 0.2 percent to 656,691 contracts in the week ended Oct. 11, Commodity Futures Trading Commission data show. The Standard & Poor’s GSCI Index of 24 commodities rose 5.2 percent last week, the most since December and enough to take the gauge out of the bear market it entered last month. Hedge funds had cut their bets by 49 percent in the previous four weeks.

The surge in prices mirrored the advance in global equities, while Treasuries declined for a third consecutive week, on mounting investor confidence. Leaders from the biggest economies began talks to tame Europe’s debt crisis and Slovakia provided the needed approval to enhance a euro region bailout fund. U.S. retail sales rose the most in seven months.

“We’re not having the same kind of recession as 2008, so we’re not going to have the same kind of drop in commodity prices,” said Brett Hammond, a senior economist with TIAA-CREF, a New York-based pension manager with $469 billion in assets. “Some of the air has come out of the bubble, but overall, I think there’s a lot more room for commodities to run.”...MORE