“I expect to see a globally integrated market for fresh water within 25 to 30 years. Once the spot markets for water are integrated, futures markets and other derivative water-based financial instruments — puts, calls, swaps — both exchange-traded and OTC will follow….Water as an asset class will, in my view, become eventually the single most important physical-commodity based asset class, dwarfing oil, copper, agricultural commodities and precious metals.”

– Willem Buiter, Citigroup Chief Economist

Financial interests have determined that trading money, risk and related financial products outperforms the profitability of manufacturing products or even trading goods and services. Now, they are aiming to exploit our common resources for profit.

Much lauded by the banking industry, the financialization of nature reduces the value of water and other life-giving resources to exchangeable financial instruments. But these market-based schemes are largely voluntary and entirely unregulated, representing a drastic departure from the regulation of pollution that helped clean our air and water in the latter half of the 20th century, and undermining the human right to water.

Learn More

• Don’t Bet on Wall Street: The Financialization of Nature and the Risk to Our Common Resources
• No apueste a Wall Street: la financiarización de la naturaleza y el riesgo para nuestros bienes comunes
• World Water Forum Paves the Way to Privatize Nature, Undermine Human Right to Water in RIO+20
• Why Privatization Harms Shrinking Freshwater Supplies and Why Nations Must Recognize the Human Right to Water

• Goodlatte-Holden Chesapeake Bay Bill Trades Away Bay Protections

• Pollution Trading and the Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load
• Bad Credit: How Pollution Trading Fails the Environment
• See the Video: Stop the Takeover of Nature by Financial Markets