Betting the Business

The SEC is currently considering whether to allow JP Morgan and Blackrock to list new copper ETF’s on the NYSE Arca. Some copper industry players oppose the listing, as does U.S. Senator Carl Levin and the advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform. Comment letters can be found here. Earlier this month, SEC Staff in the Division of Risk, Strategy, and Financial Innovation filed a memo reporting its empirical analysis that downplays any potential problem. That memo is a testament to how America’s financial regulators too often fail in their duty to protect the sound functioning of US financial markets.

The SEC staff asks two narrow questions.

First, is there a simple and enduring mechanical link between the flow of money into a commodity ETF and the price of copper. They answer, ‘no.’

Second, is there a simple linear relationship between copper inventories and copper prices. Again, they answer, ‘no.’

The Staff’s analysis is faulty in many ways. Both industry players and the advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform filed careful, detailed critiques of the econometrics and reasoning. These are well worth reading, and thoroughly impugn the soundness of the Staff’s conclusions.

What alarms me most is the narrow scope of the questions that the Staff posed, even had they bothered to do a thorough analysis of those questions. A proper regulator needs to assure that the market functions well. There are any number of ways in which its operation can be disrupted. We have a long, long history of commodity markets in the US, and that means we have a long history with market manipulation and other price distortions. We have a long, long history with financial markets in the US, and that means we have many experiences with asset bubbles, especially in the recent past with the dotcom and housing bubbles, as well as the oil price bubble. Neither of the two empirical tests the SEC Staff examined touches in any way on the issues one would want to examine in order to assure the sound functioning of the copper market and the healthy contribution that financial trading could make to the market. The mechanical link the Staff searched for would not show up in a market rife with manipulation. Nor is that mechanical link necessarily symptomatic of an asset price bubble. So failing to find such a link provides no assurances that this market will function properly. And it is alarming that the SEC Staff does not explore any of these other important issues that must be settled. Just as the SEC Staff did in the Madoff case, it carefully asks the wrong questions and thereby comes to easy answers.

Personally, I’m confident that financial markets have a valuable contribution to make in extending the efficiency and productivity of the real economy. I believe that’s true for all commodity markets as well, copper included. But making that happen requires active engagement by US regulators, and not a ‘see no evil’, hands off, laissez faire approach. That way lies market disruption and an undermining of the productivity of the economy.

The SEC can do better. It must. American industry depends on it.