The Plague Year -- A Great Year For Grain Shippers -- And Investors -- August 15, 2021

NASCAR: great race. The "dinger" wins after Briscoe takes Hamlin out in "overtime."  This was great for the Allmendinger team; he came close to winning yesterday, coming in second, and today was pretty much out of it until a turn of events in "overtime." And if the crowd came to see huge wrecks, they weren't disappointed.

Ben Franklin: apocryphal? Perhaps. I don't know. "There never was a good war, nor a bad peace."

Eagerly awaiting for futures, we will start to see numbers at 6:00 p.m. ET.

Equity futures, link here: way too early but flat to slightly red. Good, good news -- early numbers suggest the Afghanistan story is a non-event for investors.  Here we go, 6:23 p.m. CT, three major indices down slightly. This suggests to me that events in Afghanistan will have no material effect on trading tomorrow unless we start getting "different" news. Good, bad, or indifferent, Joe Biden will get credit for ending the US-Afghanistan war; he will get credit for pulling US troops out of Afghanistan, something his predecessor failed to do. Good, bad, or indifferent, did Biden just pull off a Trumanesque moment? Later, 8:57 p.m. CT: Dow futures down 121 points.

WTI, link here, way too early, still no trading. $68.44 before first futures. Here we go, how worried are oil traders worried about Afghanistan? First numbers: WTI down another 23 cents, now trading at $68.21. Later, 8:57 p.m. CT: WTI drops another dollar; now trading at $67.52.

Economy: this is a huge story on so many levels. A huge "thank you" to the reader who just sent the link. Both Canadian railways set grain shipping records in 2020 - 2021. Link here.

• the plague year: 2020 - 2021
• record-setting year for both railways: CN and CP
• should not be a huge surprise:
• Chinese floods that were reported last year:
• the new huge dam China completed, flooding tens of thousands of farmland
• three weeks ago: "why is China facing record floods?"
• CN: fourteen straight months of Canadian grain volume shipment records
• CN and CP each ship about 30 million tonnes per year
• this is the fourth straight year CP Rail broke its single-year record for grain movement
• implications:
• Warren Buffett: BNSF
• UNP
• Cargill reported record earnings for the plague year
• as I've said often: the plague year was great for investors
• see next graphic
  

Money market: my favorite graphic -- from July 22, 2021: the "folks" at the far right in the graph below are daring the equity markets to take a 10% pullback: