However, the past decade (2000-09) saw a rapid proliferation in the financialization of commodities, i.e., the creation and trading of financial instruments indexed to commodity prices. Estimates indicate that assets allocated to commodity index trading rose from $13 billion in 2004 to $260 billion in March 2008. Many people, including policymakers and economists, have posited that because this rapid and unprecedented growth in commodity index trading coincided with a boom in commodity prices, speculation by financial traders—and not supply and demand—drove the recent bubble in commodities.2 (See Figure 1.)