Speculation and buffer stocks: the legacy of Keynes and Kahn

The paper studies Keynes’s position on commodity markets, both as speculator and theorist, and it examines the proposals of buffer stocks that he put forward in various drafts during the Anglo-American negotiations for post-war planning. The paper also considers Kahn’s contribution, which brought forward the original intuition by Keynes after the end of World War II, and draws some general considerations on the relevance of these proposals for the stabilisation of commodity prices