Money manager capitalism - characterized by highly leveraged funds seeking maximum returns in an environment that systematically underprices risk - has resulted in a series of boom-and-bust cycles in equities, real estate, and commodities. Because subsequent cycles have been increasingly...

We use two approaches to examine the macroeconomic consequences of disruptions in global food commodity markets. First, we embed a novel quarterly composite global production index for the four basic staples (corn, wheat, rice and soybeans) in a standard vector autoregression (VAR) model, and we...