Word: bushels
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...levels. The targets are much higher than the historical market price of these commodities, thus increasing the chances for bigger handouts and locking an inflationary bias into farm policy for the next four years. For example, at this time last year the selling price of wheat was $1.69 a bushel: corn was $1.30 and cotton 35 cents. In the Senate version of the bill, the Government would make up the difference to farmers if the price of wheat fell under $2.28 a bushel, corn below $1.53 and cotton under 43 cents...
...rest of the world may, in fact, be gone forever. According to the General Accounting Office, the $1 billion sale of U.S. grain to the Soviet Union last fall was by far the biggest cause in lifting the price of American wheat by 100%, to $3 a bushel, and led to increases in the cost of flour and bread. On top of that, the GAO reports, the Agriculture Department made things worse by paying $300 million in subsidies to keep the selling price to the Russians unrealistically...
...name of the new speculation game is soybeans. More precisely, it is soybean futures. One representative contract shot up from $3.20 per bushel last summer to a record $7 early in March and closed last week at $6.18. That outstripped even the performance of feed corn, lumber studs, and other commodities-including metals-that have also been putting on a pyrotechnic show. The fireworks have tempted investors, who not long ago considered soybeans to be little more than a health food...
...buys a future agrees to take delivery of-and pay for -a certain amount of a commodity that can be sent to him anywhere from a day to a year and a half after purchase. That arrangement has given more than one investor nightmares about having 5,000 bushels of wheat or five tons of sugar dumped on his doorstep. In fact, only 2% of all futures trades result in actual deliveries to a bakery, metal-processing plant or other users of the goods. The rest are purely paper transactions; if the holder of a soybean future, for example, theoretically...
...actually sell for in one to nine months. Since November, the 124-year-old exchange's volume record and many of its price records have been broken as frantic traders have bid up many farm products. Early this year, for example, wheat was selling for around $1.48 a bushel for deliveries in March, but traders are now agreeing to pay $2.69 a bushel. Such sky-high prices will push the value of all commodities traded on the exchange this year to an estimated $120 billion, a 36% increase over last year's record of $88 billion...