CAN INFLATION EXPECTATIONS BE MEASURED USING COMMODITY FUTURES PRICES?

Rasheed Saleuddin

No 20, Working Papers from Department of Economic and Social History at the University of Cambridge

Abstract: This paper reexamines the use of US commodity futures price data to show that the US deflation of 1929 to 1932 was at best no more than partially anticipated by economic actors. By focusing on the expected real interest rate, these studies provide some empirical support for explanations of the Great Depression that are not exclusively monetary in nature. However, these studies did not consider the context and the market microstructures from which the data was sourced. Our analysis suggests that it is more likely that agricultural commodity markets fully adjusted to deflationary expectations by the end of 1930. Commodities futures market evidence thus should not be used to critique the Keynesian challenge to the classical monetarist explanation of the Great Depression.

Keywords: commodity futures; Keynes; great depression; inflation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2014-08-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Cambridge Working Paper in Economic & Social History, No. 20

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econsoc.hist.cam.ac.uk/docs/CWPESHnumber20August2014.pdf None. (application/pdf)
None.

Related works:
Journal Article: Can inflation expectations be measured using commodity futures prices? (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cmh:wpaper:20

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economic and Social History at the University of Cambridge Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Guillaume Proffit () and Alexis Litvine ().