This article sketches an ethics of (financial) speculation in futures markets. (1) It identi-fies an intentionalistic fallacy prevalent in moral criticisms of speculation in general and of financial speculation in particular. (2) It scrutinizes the degree to which the recent debate on financial speculation with agricultural commodities follows the general pat-tern of moral criticism and its intentionalistic fallacy. (3) It then provides a theoretical and empirical in-depth analysis of long-only index funds engagement in futures markets and concludes that moral criticisms which put them in the pillory as "hungermakers" are unjust(ified). This proves that ethics, understood as a theory of morality, can criticize moral criticisms of financial speculation on moral grounds. (4) Finally, this article dis-cusses the option of interdisciplinary cooperation between ethics and economics.
A large body of research now links financial sector development, including the depth of the banking system, liquidity in capital market, and financial liberalisation to long-run growth and poverty reduction. According to a recent World Bank report,1 "As the dust settles from the great financial crises of 1997-98, the potentially disastrous consequences of weak financial markets are apparent". The report further states that the importance of getting financial policy making right has become one of the most critical development issues in this century. In the past, there have been two extreme approaches concerning financial market regulation. One clearly supports the central role of state in the financial markets, whereas, the other sees state intervention more of a problem than as the solution. Of these two rather diverging ideologies, the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) advocate the development of market institutions, more liberalisation and lesser role of state. Pakistan has been following IFI advice in this regard. However, after the East Asian Crisis, a strong point of view has emerged that believes that in developing countries, ruling out state's role from financial markets is unrealistic. But, the state has to play a developmental role. According to Stiglitz (1991), "governments have played a central role—whether good or ill may be debated—in the development of most of those countries which today belong among the more developed".
One of the attractive features of financial assets is linked to their ability to increase or preserve their buyers wealth. Soaring prices provoke investors euphoria, their decline - paralysis. In 2010 capital in the USA has moved from the stock market to the bonds market that directly reflects low inflation expectations and current low interest rates. High demand on government securities is due to new economic growth deceleration expectations.
Consumer credit is a crucial source of financial support for most Americans—part of what scholars dub the "credit-welfare state." Yet, borrowers have been reluctant to take political action to demand better consumer financial protection, even as subprime lending proliferates. This paper articulates a broad theory of regulatory feedback effects, proposing specific mechanisms through which regulatory policy making shapes consumers' politics. Drawing on the case of consumer financial protection, I argue that consumer credit regulations produce feedback effects that diminish political engagement by encouraging borrowers to blame and subsequently target market actors—including financial institutions and consumers themselves—for both systemic and individual problems with predatory lending. I analyze an original policy dataset, original survey of 1,500 borrowers, and two survey experiments to test this hypothesis. I find that borrowers' experiences with credit regulation diminish their political engagement, even for reforms they support, limiting the prospects for safeguarding Americans' financial security.
The Jobs Act (L. 10 December 2014, n. 183) represents the last Italian labor market reform, aimed at creating new stable employment through the adoption of the new form of open-ended contracts ("contratto a tutele crescenti") as the privileged form of recruitment. This goal is based on the idea that the structural rigidities of the labor market, such as the employment protection systems, the high firing costs and the strong trade union powers, are the main source of the mismatching between labor demand and supply and the persistent unemployment registered since the 90's. For this reason, over the past 20 years, the implemented policy (Treu Law, Biagi Law and Fornero Reform) has been addressed to remove this kind of rigidities, following the guidelines outlined by the flexicurity regimes used in northern Europe. However, they have not achieved the goal for which they were designed, but they have rather produce a dualist labor market with an increasing share of precarious workers, without reducing the unemployment rate. Indeed, as shown by Blanchard et al., the success of the flexicurity model in the Nordic countries reflects underlying factors, like the degree of trust between firms and workers, that may not be easily replicable in other countries as Italy. The Jobs Act tries to stimulate the long-term employment by simplifying the procedure to establish a working relationship and redefine the dismissals regime through the reduction of the cases of reinstatement and the decrease of the firing costs for the firms. At the same time, the Italian government introduced with the Budget Law (Legge di Stabilità, L. 23 December 2014, n. 190) temporary incentives lasting three years targeting those firms hiring workers according to the new labor-market regime. Employing the data collected by Italian National Institute of Statistics in February 2015 and 2016, I estimate through the pscore matching method the average effect of the treatment on the treated, i.e. the average effect of the reform -the treatment- on those firms who have applied it -the treated-, by comparing with the untreated. Estimation results show that an increase in the probability of being hired with a fixed-term contract after the introduction of the Jobs Act reform. Particularly, the 31,1 % of firms who took advantage of the reform have hired a worker with a fixed-term contract. The reasons behind these results could be several. First of all, the reform has also introduced some measures (such as vouchers as a method of payment and the abrogation of some substantial requirements to use fixed-term contracts) which contribute having fewer constraints and fewer costs for the adoption of those contracts. Secondly, we have found a significant impact of the incentives from Budget Law on the new hires. Namely the result of the cross-firm evidence is that the incentives are associated with an increase, on average, of 43,4 percentage points in the probability of hiring. Indeed these monetary incentives are exploitable not only by the firms which hire workers with an open-ended contract, but also by the firms which hire with a fixed-term contract that has to be transformed in an open-ended one in the future, considering the possibility that after those three years the workers could be easily fired given the extremely cheap dismissal conditions. The evidence provided by this study casts some doubts about the effectiveness of the measures based on the flexibilization of the Italian labor market on the long-term employment, given that the precariousness emerged in the last 20 years after the first flexibility reforms seems not decreased at all after the Jobs Act. Nevertheless, given the limited information set provided by the dataset in use, one should take the results of the analysis as a sort of starting point for further research in different direction, both obtaining a more informative dataset and applying other treatment models.
SUMMARYVoluntary export restraints (VRSs) and orderly marketing arrangements (OMAs) are increasingly important relative to explicit trade restrictions such as tariffs and quotas. Unlike the latter, which are applied by the importing countries, VERs and OMAs as protectionist techniques are implemented under duress by the exporting nations themselves. They are part of a growing 'rifle approach' to protection designed to curb imports specifically from 'disruptive' supplier countries. Textiles, footwear, consumer electronics and steel are some of the product groups affected in recent years, with Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Brazil, Taiwan and Singapore among the main victims. In 1976 an estimated $ 9.4 billion of international trade was covered by such restrictions, or about 16% of OECD imports in the affected product categories. It is often alleged that such 'voluntary' controls are less trade‐restrictive than outright quotas imposed on imports. This paper shows that, in the event that export licences are themselves tradeable and subject to monopolization ‐ which is often the case – precisely the opposite will tend to be the case. Even greater restrictiveness may occur when multiple products are covered by a single OMA or VER.
