Four Articles on Commodities: Commodity Agreements, Commodity Markets, Cornering the Market and Cross Hedging

This paper collects four short articles on commodities which eventually be published in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. "Commodity Agreements" concerns international attempts to manage commodity trade. It treats their history, objectives, coverage, and methods. " Commodity Markets " discusses the particular industry structure that distinguishes commodities from other goods and identifies two persistent concerns with commodities : the secular tendency toward worsening terms of trade versus manufactures and the instability of their prices. "Cornering the Markets" considers why manipulations, that is, the exercise of temporary monopoly power, are typically associated with goods for which futures are traded. "Cross Hedging" describes how understanding the practice of seeking to shift price risk for one good by trading futures for a rather different good leads to a general model of risk shifting or hedging. It explores the close relation to the notion of speculating on the basis.