When I was a kid I saw The China Syndrome, a movie about a nuclear meltdown. I don’t remember much about it, but I recall that a big part of the disaster came from a gauge which seemed to be suggesting one thing, so the frantic workers acted in accordance with a standard approach, but sadly the gauge was just simply stuck and a tap with a finger fixed it – too late.
I’m not suggesting that happened in Japan this week, but yesterday and over the weekend I thought a lot about that scene as I watched the big gauges of the commodities markets to try to Sussex out the way the market was looking at the disaster. Commodity prices swung wildly, currencies jolted around, equity indexes slumped, treasury bond yields surged, etc.
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It all means something, probably “the truth,” but these are notoriously unreliable and blunt gauges that we rely upon for our analysis, and as in The China Syndrome, the can be wrong for mechanical reasons.
Yesterday I noticed on the charts that crop futures had nicely stopped their slide, but today they’re back into sliding. When I get back to the office I’ll put up some nice charts for you to look at. Right now I’m sitting in the parking lot of a curling club in Stonewall, about to cover a CWB regional meeting. It’s about as far as you can imagine from the Japanese situation, but I’m able to tap into the Japanese situation throughout the day with this iPad I’m writing with right now, and through the buzzing little blackberry on my hip.
We’re all so amazingly connected to the world now, but what does it mean for us? That’s something I hope to hear about at the meeting.
