Anyone else notice that the ag markets have gotten awfully flat in the past couple of months?
The only one looking peppy there is corn, which we really don’t grow much of here in the prairies. Otherwise crop futures prices for new crop have been bobbling around at the top of this flagpole we’re sitting on.
It seems like the doldrums, but looking out over those still waters from the poop deck, I can’t help but get a creepy feeling that there are seamonsters lurking beneath the surface, uncurling and getting ready to surge upwards at our ship.
Now, I realize my feelings mean nothing whatsoever in regards to where crop prices are actually going to go from here, but there do seem to be quite a few uglinesses crawling into the markets, challenging everyone’s beliefs about the underlying demand for the crops we grow and livestock we raise.
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Late season rainfall creates concern about Prairie crop quality
Praying for rain is being replaced with the hope that rain can stop for harvest. Rainfall in July and early August has been much greater than normal.
More and more unsettling news is coming out of China, with that nation’s attempts to hold its booming economy together looking increasingly unsuccessful. The wheels could come off that wagon anytime. Bears have called for that to happen for a decade, and it hasn’t, but some time . . .
Japan doesn’t look much better. When it’s debt mountain finally does a Frank Slide, the country’s appetite for imports is likely to shrink a bunch.
The U.S. “recovery” is looking increasingly like a questionable concept, with energy seeping out of the economy and QE2 about to end, and all the problems staved off over the last two years finally reviving.
Europe’s a mess.
I didn’t get to go to the U2 concert here in Winnipeg 10 days ago.
All these factors add up to a scary-looking outlook for the rest of the summer and the second half of the year.
I’m glad the ag markets are sharply higher today. I’m hoping these grim feelings I’m having of seamonsters and other nautical horrors are just the dregs of a bad patch in the market we’ve been living through and that they will be dispelled as the market climbs my wall of worries.
But heck – it’s a big wall.
