The global spread of the corona virus is a massive challenge for countries in the Global South. Beyond the health crisis, many countries face economic turmoil linked to their dependence on commodities. Commodity markets have reacted strongly to the COVID-19 crisis with drastic price movements...

We show that, since the inception of energy futures markets, prices have on average exhibited backwardation. Normal backwardation has also been the norm, but, because of the low power of the standard tests, most researchers have concluded that the unbiased expectations model cannot be rejected....

This paper evaluates how different types of speculation affect the volatility of commodities' futures prices. We adopt four indexes of speculation: Working's T, the market share of non-commercial traders, the percentage of net long speculators over total open interest in future markets, which...