China Trades Enough Cotton in One Day to Make Jeans for Everyone
- Futures volumes jumped amid wider surge in commodity liquidity
- Exchanges raise fees, reduce hours to curb speculative trading
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It’s not just metals caught up in China’s commodity fever.
The equivalent of 41 million bales of cotton traded in a single day on the Zhengzhou Commodity Exchange last week, the most in more than five years and enough to make almost 9 billion pairs of jeans, or at least one for every person on the planet. Prices that had slumped to the lowest on record in February surged almost 19 percent in the four days leading up to the trading spike on Friday.