Soybean Price Quotes

American farmers produced 600 more calories per person per day in 2000 than they did in 1980. But some calories got cheaper than others: Since 1980, the price of sweeteners and added fats (most of them derived, respectively, from subsidized corn and subsidized soybeans), dropped 20 percent, while the price of fresh fruits and vegetables increased by 40 percent.

The Memoirs became the most celebrated unfinished, unpublished, unread book in history. But Chateaubriand was still broke. So Madame Récamier came up with a new scheme, and this one worked - or sort of worked. A stock company was formed, and people bought shares in the manuscript. Word futures, I guess you could call them, in the same way that people from Wall Street gamble on the price of soybeans and corn. In effect, Chateaubriand mortgaged his autobiography to finance his old age. They gave him a nice chunk of money up front, which allowed him to pay off his creditors, and a guaranteed annuity for the rest of his life. It was a brilliant arrangement. The only problem was that Chateaubriand kept on living.

China's food comes from abroad: from South America, the United States and Australia. This means prosperity for agricultural traders and processors, like Archer Daniels Midland, which is making its way into China in every way imaginable, into a $ 100 billion domestic processed food market that is growing more than 10 percent annually. This translates into a windfall for farmers in the Midwest, who are now enjoying a two-thirds rise in the price of soybeans compared to a year ago. It also means a better diet for the Chinese, who have increased their caloric intake by a third over the past 25 years.

deeply into pile carpeting that threatens to swallow us whole. A burnished steel FTW logo stretches across the wall with the tagline Feeding the World just below it. Black-and-white photos of basic foodstuffs dot the walls—bushels of maize and soybeans, fields of grain. Feeding the world, my ass, I think as we’re shuttled toward a meeting room. I’ve done some reading up on these folks. FTW is a commodity-trading firm that works to manipulate the futures market to drive up prices. There seems to be nothing that the world’s bankers believe they shouldn’t be free to exploit, including food staples. I imagine that in their perfect world, bankers would pocket a penny or two with every bite.

the markets was much more fun than having a real job. As long as my basic living expenses were covered, I knew I’d be happy. In 1977, Barbara and I decided to have a child, so we got married. We moved into a rented brownstone in Manhattan and I moved the company there too. The Russians were buying lots of grain at the time and wanted my advice, so I took Barbara on a combined honeymoon–business trip to the USSR. We arrived in Moscow on New Year’s Eve and rode by bus from the drab airport through a dusting of snow, past St. Basil’s Cathedral to a big party with a lot of incredibly friendly, fun-loving Russians. My business has always been a way to get me into exotic places and allow me to meet interesting people. If I make any money from those trips, that’s just icing on the cake. MODELING MARKETS AS MACHINES I was really getting my head into the livestock, meat, grain, and oilseed markets. I loved them because they were concrete and less subject than stocks to distorted perceptions of value. While stocks could stay too high or too low because “greater fools” kept buying or selling them, livestock ended up on the meat counter where it would be priced based on what consumers were willing to pay. I could visualize the processes that led to those sales and see the relationships underlying them. Since livestock eat grain (mostly corn) and soymeal, and since corn and soybeans compete for acreage, those markets

Where else does one find exchanges as important as the New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange, the New York Mercantile Exchange, the New York Cotton Exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and numerous other exchanges for currency, coffee, sugar, tea, cocoa, soybeans, oats, wheat, cattle, hogs, lumber, diamonds, iron, ivory, marble, spices, cosmetics, steel, tin, zinc, rubber, etc. Those exchanges, through which the world’s commerce is passed daily, are all located in one country. They’re not in Iraq, nor in Rome.

Revelation Chapter 18 details the many goods which are sold through the Daughter of Babylon’s ports. The lengthy list appears in Revelation 18:11-13. Take any one of those goods listed by John two thousand years ago and ask this question: is any other nation the center for world trade in those commodities, except for the United States? Where else does one find exchanges as important as the New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange, the New York Mercantile Exchange, the New York Cotton Exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and numerous other exchanges for currency, coffee, sugar, tea, cocoa, soybeans, oats, wheat, cattle, hogs, lumber, diamonds, iron, ivory, marble, spices, cosmetics, steel, tin, zinc, rubber, etc. Those exchanges, through which the world’s commerce is passed daily, are all located in one country. They’re not in Iraq, nor in Rome.

In the eighties, according to William Heffernan, a sociologist at the University of Missouri, agriculture experts generally agreed that if four companies controlled over 40 percent of market share in a given field, it was no longer competitive. Today, however, Heffernan estimates, the four largest players process 81 percent of the beef, 59 percent of the pork, and 50 percent of the chicken produced in the United States. The same phenomenon is at work in grain: the largest four process 61 percent of American wheat, 80 percent of American soybeans, and either 57 percent or 74 percent of American corn, depending on the method.33 It is no coincidence that the internal motto of Archer Daniels Midland, the grain-processing giant notorious for its political clout and its price-fixing, is reported to be “the competitor is our friend and the customer is our enemy.

You get a lot more calories for the price of hamburgers and french fries than you do for carrots, not least because the government subsidizes the production of corn and soybeans, the basis of cheap corn sweeteners and vegetable oil.