The September 30, 1978 legislation (P.L. 95-405), which renewed the authority of the CFTC to regulate futures markets, directs the Commission to solicit the advice of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve before authorizing any additional futures contracts that specify delivery of U.S. Government...

In a recent article, Ederington (1979) examined the hedging performance of financial futures markets using a portfolio model derived from the hedging theories of Stein (1961) and Johnson (1960). His article concluded that GNMA futures were more effective than T-Bill futures in reducing price...

In a recent article, Puglisi developed and tested a model for evaluating the efficiency of the Treasury bill futures market. He found that the market for Treasury bill futures was not efficient because arbitrage opportunities existed involving transactions in futures and outstanding Treasury...

Until the existence of financial futures, testing the determinants and the informational content of futures market prices has been difficult because of the vagaries associated with commodity markets. In the case of Treasury bill futures, the existence of an active secondary market and the...

The nature of short- and long-term business cycles is a topic of considerable interest to futurists, since the state of the economy affects the possibilities for dealing with so many other areas of interest, from pollution control to child care. In this article, which is based on a talk that the...

This paper utilizes a new approach to an examination of price impacts of speculators on futures markets. It focuses initially on specially obtained data on commodity “pools,” which are large funds of money that may move quickly between and across futures markets and other financial markets;...

Mandelbrot has recently proposed that the distribution of income might be described by a class of mathematical processes called Stable Paretian functions. These functions have many of the desirable properties of Gaussian distributions but they have infinite variance, which has implications for...

This article describes and compares the three most popular indices that are used to measure export prices – Wholesale Price Indices, unit value indices, and export price indices. It includes a brief discussion of the methodology used in constructing the different types of price indices and the...

According to the so-called "arc sine law," mechanical trading rules applied to price movements in financial assets will result in long periods of cumulative success, but equally long periods of cumulative failure. The long periods of success will tempt investors to apply trading rules to actual...

There has been considerable debate in recent years about whether well-defined business cycles even exist. At one extreme are those who assert that so-called business cycles are caused by exogenous shocks. At the other extreme are those who believe that business cycles may be endogenous, i.e.,...