明治後期商品取引所における定期取引 : 東京商品取引所食塩取引を中心に
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概要
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This paper aims to elucidate the function of commodity exchanges in index price formation on the spot market during the later Meiji era in Japan. In particular, this paper focuses the function of periodical salt transactions (trading in futures) from October, 1894 to May, 1905 on the Tokyo Commodity Exchange. Historical studies of commodity or stock exchanges in Japan have tended to focus on the Dojima (Osaka) Rice Exchange in the Tokugawa period and historians have paid little attention to commodity exchanges from the Meiji era onward. However, the beginning of transactions in commodities other than rice on the exchanges after the enactment of the Exchange Law in 1893 was one of the important characteristics of 1890s when the base formation of the modern market progressed. Accordingly, hoping to contribute to a better understanding of the process by which the commodity exchange system was established as a general trading system with the rise of capitalism in Japan, I consider periodical transactions on the exchange around the early twentieth century. This paper shows that index price formation function of the Tokyo Commodity Exchange had two limitations. Firstly, periodical transaction price functioned only as an index price of Shinsaida-shio (low-grade salt made in the Seto Inland Sea of Japan) price. In other words, periodical transaction price did not function as an index price of any other salt. Secondly, the function of the Tokyo Commodity Exchange was diachronically unstable especially after around 1900 when salt consumers began to buy more imported than domestic salt. The Tokyo Commodity Exchange was one of the largest commodity exchanges and the center of salt periodical transactions in Japan. We can say therefore, during the later Meiji era, if a trader in the market had used periodical transactions on the commodity exchange to hedge against the risk of price changes, the trader could not have been able to hedge in many cases. Even if traders succeeded in hedging in the short term, they could not use the commodity exchange to hedge stably in the long term.
- 2011-10-30