Earlier this week, a reader sent me a link to this KFYR [K-Fire] TV, Bismarck, ND: Taiwan to purchase agricultural products to the tune of $3.5 billion from the US over the next two years. That includes soybeans and wheat, some of which could come from North Dakota, along with corn and beef.
Sounds huge, doesn't it?
Sounds like another bragging point for President Trump.
What irritates me with today's journalists: so much is never put in perspective. In this case, how does $3.5 billion over two years compare to recent history?
It took less than a New York minute to find the answer.
So, note. From the same source, the USDA via IHS Markit, in 2018, Taiwan imported $11.746 billion worth of agricultural products from around the world. It was estimated that 36% of that was from the US.
36% of $11.746 billion = $4.223 billion. For one year.
$4.223 billion for one year.
Now, back to the KFYR-TV story:$3.8 billion over two years. Taiwan plans to buy less over two years than they bought from the US last year, and the year before that, and in 2014.
Disclaimer: I often make simply errors in arithmetic.
I don't have time to expand on this, so pretty much verbatim from a reader this past week:
Following the attack on Saudi Arabia (two days earlier, on a non-trading Saturday, 1.4 billion barrels of US light sweet crude was traded on Monday,two days later, first trading day after the attack. 1.4 billion bbls is 112 times more than what we produce.
Hover over the bar graph and it shows total trading volume was at 3.68 million contracts, or 3.68 billion barrels of crude...that doesn't even include the 517 million options to buy or sell crude contracts that also traded Monday.
When I suggested to the reader my thoughts on the trading he replied:
More than likely it's just a lot of speculators trying to make a quick
buck on the wild swings in oil prices...it looks like about 3 times the
normal volume of trading on quiet days, so I'd have to guess that a lot
of funds that normally don't trade oil regularly were in there buying or
selling...3.68 billion times $60 oil with over a 15% swing in prices
during the day means a lot of guys lost their shirts, while others
bought their babies a new pair of shoes..
The point I usually make when i mention this is that it's the
speculators in New York and London who control the price of oil, just
based on the shear volume they trade electronically, compared to the
physical quantity available...
BTW, this was an all-time record amount of trading.
The reader will expand on this in "Focus on Fracking," which will be updated this evening.
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$8/Month
That's the price of unlimited Amazon music streaming. One can also get it for free and probably get 90% of the Amazon music library, but if you want it all, it will cost $8/month. For that price you can listen to the music on any Echo Dot in the house, but if you want to hear it simultaneously on all Echos in the house, one needs to pay another $10 (or something like that; we don't have that) for the "Family Plan."
I don't know if it's worth it or not. How would I know? All I know is that whatever I ask Alexa to play, she finds it for me and plays it for me.
Occasionally she doesn't understand what I'm saying and it takes a couple of times to get what I'm looking for, but that's actually a bit of the allure, I suppose.
Today, I was reading an essay on Robbie Robertson in the weekend edition of the WSJ. While reading the article, I asked Alexa, "Play Robbie Robertson." Unlike YouTube there will be no commercial interruptions and the entire library will play. It will last longer than I will be in the house this afternoon.
It should be noted that more and more "children" wells are being drilled every month in the Bakken. I would wager that "children" wells now account for majority of wells being drilled in North Dakota. And production keeps improving. See this post.
