Dynamics Between Strategic Commodities and Financial Variables

This study employs the bounds testing approach to cointegration to investigate the relationships between the prices of two strategic commodities (oil and gold) and the financial variables (interest rates, exchange rates and stock prices) of Japan – a major oil-consuming and goldholding country. Our results suggest that the prices of gold and stock can help form expectations of higher inflation over time. In the short run, only gold prices impact the interest rate in Japan. Overall the findings of this study could help the Japanese monetary authority in conducting monetary policy and investors of Japanese yen in building their optimal portfolios. Specifically our findings suggest that the optimal choice in the long term for those who invest in yendenominated assets would be to include gold in their portfolios.