Tag Archives Commodities — page 10

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 […] Read more

One thing that’s really been obvious to me in the last couple of weeks, as I’ve called numerous traders, analysts and academics who deal with futures markets, is just how incredibly difficult it is to set up a futures market. Commodity markets that have a robust futures market offering open, public prices  aren’t the only […] Read more

Will Winnipeg end up having futures contracts for Canadian spring wheat, durum and barley? Life after the Canadian Wheat Board’s monopolies will be a lot easier if thriving new futures contracts arise before the beginning of the 2012-13 crop year, when the board loses its monopolies and farmers will need to think a lot more […] Read more

Two big moves in the market in the past couple of days have offered delightful examples of the role of stupidity, ignorance and humanity in the markets. One deals with wheat, the other with European equity markets. They’re both perfect examples of why the rational markets hypothesis doesn’t work in practice, since it doesn’t include […] Read more

This morning I have been talking with a couple of farmers desperately trying to get fields seeded before the five or six days of rain the weather forecasters are threatening Manitoba with. They felt lucky. They were able to seed something. Thousands of other farmers can’t get onto their fields at all. So, with a […] Read more

The ag commodity markets have been doldrummy recently. So have commodities in general. Arrrrrr, but don’t let that fool yer remaining eye, matey! Because this is the time of year when squalls can appear on the horizon and rapidly become storms. There’s a lot of chop in the markets right now, with bad weather in […] Read more

This weekend millions of Canadians will gather across this great country to recall that golden era of Canadian and human history when Queen Victoria ruled. Well, perhaps it’ll be just me, and everyone else will be out at barbeques thinking about the NHL playoffs, whining about high gas prices, and wondering why they didn’t pick […] Read more

I spoke with Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz yesterday and he answered the questions I recently asked in my blog and in the newspaper: 1) What are you going to do? 2) When are you going to do it? What I took from our conversation was that the government will break the export monopolies for both […] Read more

Now that just-re-appointed agriculture minister Gerry Ritz has revealed the government’s plans for the CWB – breaking both the wheat and barley monopolies for the 2012-13 crop year – we can think a bit more clearly about what farming life will be like afterwards. And while most of the endless political and ideological debates of […] Read more

A vexing, outraging or amusing (depending on your situation and whether you’re about to lose your farm to the water) element in the Assiniboine flood story has been the scrap over a bad gauge in Saskatchewan being the cause of Manitoba’s woeful unpreparedness for the extent of the waters causing the deliberate dike breach at […] Read more