CONCLUSION
The case of Metallgesellschaft provides a wide array of lessons for businesses interested in properly hedging their exposure to various risks. Taking MGRM’s decision to provide long-term contracts for granted and focusing instead on the design of the hedge used to manage the risk of the business, one can use the Metallgesellschaft case to elucidate the importance of maturity structure in hedging as in every other product line of finance. A hedge with a mismatched maturity structure can create enormous funding risks. The case of Metallgesellschaft only reinforces the recommendations of the Group of Thirty that a corporation’s position needs to be stress tested and evaluated against worst case scenarios. It is folly to put in place a seemingly innocuous hedge without careful regard for the possibly temporary but nevertheless large amount of financing it may require in the event of unfavorable price movements. If, as is often the case, the original reason for hedging is to avoid funding problems arising in the course of the firm’s normal operations, then cash flow patterns ought to be the starting point and not an afterthought in the choice of hedging instruments. The maturity structure of a hedge is also central to the degree to which the firm’s value is actually hedged; a mismatch in maturity structure means that the firm has assumed important risks. The Metallgesellschaft case also illuminates the fine line that sometimes exists between hedging and speculating. The lingo of the derivatives industry and its relative novelty has allowed a number of speculative activities to be passed off as “risk management.” MGRM’s losses in late 1993 made this pretense no longer possible, and Metallgesellschaft’s shareholders and creditors took the necessary remedial actions to limit the sorry consequences. MGRM’s use of a one-for-one hedge of near-month futures looks superficially to be a straightforward purchase of insurance against capital gains and losses on its delivery contracts. In reality, the entire line of business was a bet on the basis, a bet on the roll return earned by the futures contracts in a backwardated market. Adding this bet onto the balance sheet of a major industrial corporation was a disastrous mistake. Recognizing the bets implicit in a variety of hedging strategies requires careful attention. As the Metallgesellschaft case illustrates, the stakes can be high.