Global Liquidity and Commodity Prices

Abstract

While monetary easing and increasing participation of financial institutions in commodity trading have enhanced the financialization of commodity markets, this paper investigates empirically whether the impact of global liquidity on commodity prices has grown since the crisis. For each commodity group, this paper uses a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model to address the short-run relationship between global liquidity and commodity prices. The key finding is that the effect of global liquidity on commodity prices becomes more salient since the global financial crisis. This paper also suggests a price-based liquidity indicator has a greater explanatory power for the commodity price dynamics than monetary aggregates.