Global Commodities: Physical, Financial, and Sustainability Aspects

Murad Harasheh

Feb 2021 · Springer Nature

About this ebook

For many academics, students, and professionals, the field of commodities is a black box. This book explores commodities in a holistic manner, presenting concepts from a multidisciplinary business and financial perspective, and offering a panoramic view of the global commodity business and markets. In this book, the author presents core issues related to global commodities with recent data including COVID-19. The book introduces the key physical commodities traded globally and some related issues such as the global supply chain, global trading, transportation, storage, and how to finance global commodity trades. Then, it discusses how global commodity businesses and traders manage global risks related to commodity production (generation or extraction), transportation, storage, the final delivery, and currency exchange. Additionally, the book discusses financial commodities, the origins of global commodity derivatives and exchanges, the rationale behind the birth of commodity futures and trading, hedging, speculation, financialization, and manipulation of commodity markets, and how financial trading is executed in real life. In the last section, the author also discusses sustainability issues related to global commodities and the financial valuation aspects of the global commodity businesses supported by examples from real cases with recent data.

About the author

Murad Harasheh received his PhD in Economics, Law, and Institutions in 2014 from IUSS University School for Advanced Studies Pavia, Italy, and his Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees (with distinction) in Business and Finance from Birzeit University, Palestine. He worked from 2008 to 2011 as a full-time Lecturer and Researcher of Finance at Birzeit University, from 2007 to 2011 as a financial consultant and investment analyst, from 2015 to 2017 as an economist and energy market analyst at the Italian Regulatory Authority for Energy, Networks, and Environment (ARERA) in collaboration with the University of Pavia, and from 2017 to 2020 as a research fellow at the University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the University of Bologna, Italy. His primary research interests are related to firm valuation, energy and commodity finance, and sustainability economics. He is an author of various publications in international journals in finance, business valuation, and energy. He teaches Corporate Finance, Financial Valuation, Global Commodity Markets, Energy Markets, and Risk Management.