LEX If you don’t like the facts, then find new ones. A year after six federal agencies asked their best and brightest to determine whether or not speculators were responsible for then-surging commodity prices, one senior US bureaucrat promised a “new and better report” this month. Though the Commodity Futures Trading Commission will not confirm his assertion that the study will overturn the original conclusion that speculators merely follow prices set by supply and demand, ongoing public hearings suggest as much.
Whether it is US congressional bills targeting “excessive speculation” or Gordon Brown, UK prime minister, and Nicolas Sarkozy, French president, inveighing against “damaging speculation,” there is a clear political imperative on both sides of the Atlantic to blunt the commodity rally.
