Supply pushes grain prices down today

LA Times (who ‘d have thought LA worried about grain markets?!)

Wheat, Corn and Beans futures are all coming off lately but Corn was the victim today.

Locked limit down on the CBOT…can’t wait to see tomorrow’s action.

From Bloomberg News:

“About 87.035 million acres were planted with corn, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said today in a report following a survey of farmers. That was up 2.4% from the March forecast on growers’ intentions and 1.2% higher than the 85.98 million last year. The average estimate of 24 analysts in a Bloomberg News survey was for 85.16 million acres.

“The U.S. corn report showed ‘an awfully big acreage number and suggests inventories will be more comfortable,’ said Tim Emslie, a research manager at Country Hedging Inc. in Inner Grove Heights, Minnesota.”

Near-term corn futures in Chicago today have plunged the maximum daily limit of 30 cents, to $3.47 a bushel. The price has tumbled 23% from $4.49 a bushel June 2.

“Facebook has become a toy. Once a service recommends my father-in-law to me, it no longer adds any value in my life.” Howard Lindzon

HT to Damien Hoffman aka Wall Street Cheat Sheet

Damien: Do you have a core personal philosophy you tapped to develop that theory?

Howard: Yeah. In my soul I believe that positivity is rewarded. I truly believe in karma. I hang around with positive people who don’t keep score — which limits the people you hang around. For example, when I go out to dinner with people and everyone adds up the bill and I owe $11.22, you’re not going to see me hanging out with that group of people. Life’s too short. There’s no quarterly balance sheet. The balance sheet is over a much longer time frame. This philosophy is not going to make me the richest person in the world, but sometimes the richest people are the cheapest. I see this as one’s inner-gauge, which ultimately becomes that person’s lifestyle.

Twitter is interesting for this very reason. If your a negative person, you can’t hide that on Twitter for six months. For example, when I blog I can go through a negative phase, but on Twitter if I twit something negative, a few tweets later I’m back to positive again because Twitter is who you are. That’s why the feeds in Twitter and Facebook are so popular: you can’t hide who you are. If you’re a miserable fuck — and I could name five of them but I don’t want to give them the credibility — you’ll have your following but your followers are all miserable fucks too. That’s why the tech guys have been penciled into a corner with the nerds who like to fight all the time. They haven’t been as successful on Twitter because they’re always fighting. On the other hand, the entertainers have taken over Twitter because they are entertainers — they do things that are positive or funny or have something irreverent to say. That appeals to a much broader audience.

Damien: Do you prefer Facebook or Twitter?

Howard: Facebook is just too fake for me. First of all, Facebook is littered with people making mistakes because they think what is funny really isn’t. Second, it’s a big lie because people get to post the pictures they want everyone to see — like during high school when you put stuff on your wall. Everyone does the same thing: they hang what represents who they want to be, not what represents who they truly are.

Damien: You did a cool blog post about how Facebook is the ego and Twitter is the Id.

Howard: Exactly. I am not on Twitter’s recommended list. People who follow me have stuck with me because I share or because I make them laugh. That’s how I live my life. However, on Facebook I have a lot more followers, but I never go there. When someone follows me on Facebook they have a perceived vision of me. If they knew the real me, the one on Twitter, they’d have a fucking heart attack — they’d never invest with me again. [Laughing.]

“Green shoots, really?!”

John Mauldin of Outside the Box newsletter fame (great commentator that he is) points us to a commentary by the veritable Paul Krugman (in the form of an interview), regarding our so-called green shoots emerging in our financial markets.  He compares our impending or current situation depending on what you believe, to Japan’s “Lost Decade”.

PK: The thing about Japan, as with all of these cases, is how much people claim to know what happened, without having any evidence. What we do know is that recessions normally end everywhere because the monetary authority cuts interest rates a lot, and that gets things moving. And what we know in Japan was that eventually they cut their interest rates to zero and that wasn’t enough. And, so far, although we made the cuts faster than they did and cut them all the way to zero, it isn’t enough. We’ve hit that lower bound the same as they did. Now, everything after that is more or less speculation.

For example, were the problems with the Japanese banks the core problem? There are some stories about credit rationing, but they are not overwhelming. Certainly, when we look at the Japanese recovery, there was not a great surge of business investment. There was primarily a surge of exports. But was fixing the banks central to export growth?

In their case, the problems had a lot to do with demography. That made them a natural capital exporter, from older savers, and also made it harder for them to have enough demand. They also had one hell of a bubble in the 1980s and the wreckage left behind by that bubble – in their case a highly leveraged corporate sector – was and is a drag on the economy.

The size of the shock to our systems is going to be much bigger than what happened to Japan in the 1990s. They never had a freefall in their economy – a period when GDP declined by 3%, 4%. It is by no means clear that the underlying differences in the structure of the situation are significant. What we do know is that the zero bound is real. We know that there are situations in which ordinary monetary policy loses all traction. And we know that we’re in one now.

Get your CDS while it is hot!

Last week apparently stock blow up insurance moved at a telling pace.  Zero Hedge explains.

While last week’s unprecedented $215 billion in CDS purchased will likely be a record for a while, this week saw yet another substantial $120 billion in net notional increase, based on 5,770 contracts exchanged. Also, net cumulative notional CDS by sector has surpassed the half a trillion mark since early April.

Alpha Clone, invest like those getting paid much more than you.

http://www.finovate.com/startup09vid/alphaclone.html

AlphaClone presented their full membership service at Finovate recently. They aggregate information about holdings of such stalwarts as Buffett and Tiger Capital progeny etc. for the lay investors benefit, of course with a price tag associated.