By Martin Hutchinson
The problem arises because of the size of the world’s capital pools in relation to its volume of trade. The total assets of U.S. hedge funds in September 2009 were $1.95 trillion (down from almost $3 trillion a year earlier). That compares with total U.S. imports of goods and services in 2008 of $2.1 trillion. However, in addition to the hedge funds, there are other huge pools of money available for deployment in commodities markets. For example China and Japan each have around $2 trillion of foreign exchange reserves, while Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states have comparable sized pools of liquid assets available for investment. Since the available inventory of commodities is a fraction of their annual production, we could potentially end up with an extreme case of too much money chasing too few goods.
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