Commodities have attracted considerable interest as a financial investment in recent years. This article discusses the factors behind their growing appeal and assesses the extent to which market characteristics, such as price volatility, have changed as a result. The feature concludes that...

Lending to emerging market economies (EMEs) through bond purchases has surged since 2009. What are the risks of a sudden stop? Bond mutual funds may curtail credit through two channels. The first is redemptions by ultimate investors. The second is additional discretionary sales by fund managers,...

We study the interactions between cryptocurrencies, stock markets, and economic policy uncertainty (EPU) by means of a Factor-Augmented Vector Autoregressive (FAVAR) framework. We rely on two market factors to model the comovements of returns within cryptocurrencies and stock markets. We...

This paper investigates whether Bitcoin can hedge and diversify risk against the Euro STOXX, Nikkei, Shanghai A-Share, S&P 500, and the TSX Index, and examines the dynamics of these abilities over different data frequencies. Pairwise GARCH models and constant conditional correlation models are...

The investment in commodities is starting to be more important during the last years. The paper describes the characteristics of financially important commodities. In many cases a passive investment in an index is most suitable. As the GSCI is found to be the most important, its underlying...