This short essay on financial speculation with agricultural commodities offers (1) a sur-vey of the real economy factors that caused recent hunger crises, (2) an overview of academic research on the impact of index-based financial speculation on agricultural futures markets, and (3) a discussion...

Diese Kurzdarstellung bietet einen Überblick (1.) über die realwirtschaftlichen Ursa-chen der jüngsten Agrarpreiskrisen sowie (2.) über die wissenschaftliche Evidenz zu der Frage, inwiefern die Agrarpreiskrisen durch index-basierte Terminmarktgeschäfte von Finanzinvestoren hervorgerufen...

For quite some time long-only index funds have been suspected of being responsible for price increases in agricultural futures markets. This suspicion has prompted demands to drastically limit long-only index funds' scope of activity. Such demands and their underlying diagnoses, however,...