Regulation
Chapter 4 analyses the new regulations introduced in the US and in the EU to respond to ‘excessive’ levels of speculation in commodity derivative markets. First, the chapter recalls the events of the global financial crisis and relates how concerns about the role that derivatives played in bringing it about have motivated reform. The chapter then outlines the new US and European regulations for over-the-counter derivatives focusing on those provisions with the potential to address concerns about food commodity speculation. After discussing a number of challenges that threaten the regulatory project, the author exposes a number of deeper, structural limitations of the Dodd Frank Act and EMIR-MiFID II reforms. The regulations are revealed to be predicated on a problematic ‘Neoliberal-Neoclassical’ understanding of how financial markets function that fundamentally fails to account for dynamics of price formation in contemporary markets.