Diversification as a commodity policy

Trust as a Commodity

Trust is central to all transactions and yet economists rarely discuss the notion. It is treated rather as background environment, present whenever called upon, a sort of ever-ready lubricant that permits voluntary participation in production and exchange. In the standard model of a market economy it is taken for granted that consumers meet their budget constraints: they are not allowed to spen...

Diagnostic information as a commodity.

In estimating the cost-effectiveness of diagnostic procedures, it is helpful to treat diagnostic information as a commodity with a unit price. The amount of useful information provided by a test result can be measured in binary units (bits), and the unit price of the information produced by the test result can be expressed in dollars per bit in much the same way that the price of gold is given ...

Portfolio Diversification with Commodity Futures: Properties of Levered Futures

Monetary Policy , Commodity Prices and Infl ation

The past years were characterized by unprecedented rises in prices of commodities such as oil or wheat and infl ation rates moved up above the mark of two percent per annum. This led to a revival of the debate whether commodity prices indicate future CPI infl ation and if they can be used as indicator variables for central banks or not. We apply various econometric methods like Granger causalit...

Policy Responses to Commodity Price Movements — 2

B etween 1986 and 1998, the price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) oil remained quite stable, fluctuating between $16 and $42 constant 2011-U.S. dollars, with the exception of a brief spike in 1990 at the time of the first Gulf War. In December 1998, the barrel of WTI had reached a low point of $17. Almost 10 years later, in July 2008, the same barrel cost $134. By March 2009, the p...