Word: hundredweights
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Moneymen are also cheered by a recent sharp plunge in some commodity prices. Wheat, for example, dropped from $6.11 per bushel in February to $3.62 last week, beef cattle from $46.25 per hundredweight to $38.90, and steel scrap from $115 per ton to $100. If these drops continue, economists believe, corporations will stop scrambling to borrow in order to stockpile raw materials. Indeed, they may sell off some of their present inventories and start repaying their loans...
Bread prices will be squeezed even higher by the continuing pressure of U.S. and foreign demand on the American wheat crop. Wheat prices to bakers have doubled in a year, to about $12 a hundredweight, and there is no indication of any decline soon. Says John McCarthy, an executive of American Bakeries Co.: "We're now talking about an 8% to 9% price increase across the board." Raisin bread will all but disappear this year; heavy rains ruined the raisin grape crop as it was drying, driving up the price more than 50% to $700 per ton. At that...
...more breeding cows than at this time last year. Ranchers and feed-lot operators can collect alltime high prices for their animals but are holding them off the market, betting that they will be worth as much as 20% more when the freeze is off. The average price per hundredweight of cattle jumped from $29 in 1971 to $33.50 last year; now it is well above $45, with bidding often as high as $56 (at that rate, ordinary ground beef would retail for $1.50 or more a lb.). In the past four weeks, the price of cattle destined for feed...
...cold last winter and late frost this spring. So far this year, shipments of onions, tomatoes and plums are down at least 50%; potatoes are down 33%, and lettuce 25%. With supplies short, prices paid to growers have soared in the past year: from $3 to $8 for a hundredweight of potatoes, and from $1.35 to $7 for 24 heads of lettuce...
...trim some meat prices. In the normal meat-producing cycle, prices should decline slightly in the next few months because farmers have been boosting production to take advantage of high prices. The price of choice beef cattle has already dropped, from a 20-year high of $36.76 per hundredweight in mid-February to $34.62 last week. Agriculture experts foresee some decline in retail beef prices-perhaps down to the level during the freeze-but warn that pork will remain in short supply and therefore expensive...