Yesterday while I sat around a Winnipeg hospital in a fancy hospital housecoat awaiting a scoping of my esophagus – a follow-up to The Steak Incident I blogged about here a couple of months ago – I was listening on my iPod to a string of Bloomberg podcasts from the past few days. Yes, I realize that makes me sound dull. But there you have it, yesterday was all Bloomberg and biopsies for me.
So anyhow, as I sat there listening to Bloomberg and ensuring that my gown didn’t come open in the back, I was pleasantly surprised to hear host Pimm Fox mention that he’d be talking about “Canadian Grain” during his program, Taking Stock. Golly, methought, someone in the bigger financial press community is paying attention to this little slice of the world markets that little old I spend inordinate amounts of time covering. How exciting! Grain doesn’t get a lot of play in the world’s biz press at the best of times and focusing on Canadian elements thereof is truly rare. A few minutes into the program, after a section on China, on came the Canuck bit and on came Mayo Schmidt of Viterra.
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That makes sense, both for Bloomberg and for Schmidt. It makes sense for Pimm because Mayo’s the big cheese of the Canadian corporate grain trade now that he’s gobbled half of it up and packed it inside Viterra and is presently wandering about on the world markets snapping up Australian grain companies and building oilseed crushing plants in China. That’s interesting. And it makes sense for Mayo because he was down in New York hawking $500 million in a debt issue for these sorts of endeavors. You want laudatory coverage in those types of circumstances, especially since the people who will buy the debt all likely listen to the program. And Viterra is consolidating more of its international debt facilities in order to more easily manage them and be set up to easily take over more companies or build more things when the opportunities come up, something Mayo told Pimm that Viterra is still interested in doing.
While none of this is news to those of us living inside the prairie grain trade, it was neat to hear it talked about on a prime time Bloomberg show, as if it mattered to the world. Briefly, ever so briefly, a Canadian grain company was in the spotlight of the Wall Street press. I was glad, that morning in the hospital, as I tried to stop my backside becoming exposed, that the front side of the industry I cover got a little bit of helpful exposure. Will it bring more money to farmers? I doubt it. Will it make Viterra a more friendly, loving company? I don’t know why it would. But it’s nice to feel like the industry you’re immersed in matters to Wall Street – even if you think Wall Street is a nest of vampires. (Who wants to be ignored by vampires? Twilight has made them cool again.)
