A 103.525 US$ por100 lb se cotizaron hoy 30 de junio de 2008 a las 3:09:26 pm, en el Chicago Mercantile Exchange, los novillos gordos en pie para matadero (Live cattle) para agosto 2008.  Esto es 2,28 US$/kg en pie.

Los precios de los principales productos agrícolas transables en Chicago fueron:

Ref. CME. Lunes 30/06/08

fun fact about this one... i used dental floss on the ticker big boards to line up the perspective lines. yep, mint flavored and all... i coated the floss with a regular gell gloss and then layed them out. the gloss acted as an adhesive while also giving a shimmer and texture dynamic. fun times, not the first time i've used physical elements to enhance a painting though. i've used pepper, spaghetti, coconut fur, faux grass, sponge and other elements before, sort of a secretive signature i'd say. what do you think, does it work well?

A processing room at the Goomtee tea estate in Darjeeling, India.

By JEREMY KAHN

GUWAHATI, India — Traders crowd around wooden desks in a huge dusty auditorium, poring over thick catalogs describing chests of tea. A broker seated at the front of the room calls out prices in a quick, rolling cadence as the traders shout and gesture, signaling their bids.

A sharp rap of the gavel closes each sale, and the process starts over — under the market’s rules, the auctioneer must sell at least three lots in a minute.

The scene repeats itself every Tuesday and Wednesday morning here at the Tea Auction Center in the state of Assam, heart of India’s famed tea country, wedged among Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and China.

Tea has been traded this way in India since 1861.

But this year, the cacophony of the public tea auctions will give way to the gentle tapping of keyboards: India’s tea markets are going digital.

Just as electronic trading rocked the floors of the New York Stock Exchange and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the move to computerized auctions promises to turn the tradition-bound world of tea traders upside down. While tea growers and large multinationals have welcomed the promise of computerized trading, many small tea brokers fear an electronic exchange will mean the end of their livelihoods.

The government body that sets the rules for tea sales in India, the Indian Tea Board, sees electronic trading as a way to help planters who have been hit hard by low tea prices for much of the last decade. Electronic trading is supposed to result in fairer prices and lower transaction costs.

Studies in other commodity markets around the world have shown even modest reductions in costs through automation can produce large increases in trading volume. The Tea Board’s effort is just one of several experiments in India in which computerized spot trading is being promoted as a way to improve the prices impoverished farmers receive for their crops.

The main advantage of the computerized system, according to the Tea Board, is that buyers can bid from anywhere, without having to be physically in the trading hall — or even in the same city where the tea is warehoused. “That means buyer participation will be more, competition will be more,” said H. N. Dwibedi, a consultant who has been advising the Tea Board on computerized trading. “Greater competition ensures that the true price is discovered.”

Mr. Dwibedi also said an electronic system should help automate the compilation of tea catalogs and eliminate the paperwork involved in settling sales, saving brokers time and money.

Workers hauling baskets of tea leaves at the Makaibari estate in Darjeeling, India. The country is the world’s largest tea producer.

India, the world’s largest tea producer, is also the third-largest exporter, after Sri Lanka and Kenya. Today, nine auction centers like the one here in Guwahati operate throughout the country, handling about 55 percent of the one million tons of Indian tea sold each year. (The rest is sold from plantations directly to tea companies or consumers.)

Getting tea to auction now can be time-consuming and expensive: planters harvest green leaves then process them into black tea or sell them to be processed. After processing, a broker takes a consignment of tea, warehouses it, assesses its quality, sends out samples to potential buyers for tasting, and produces a catalog listing the teas for sale — a process that can take weeks.

The broker then goes to an exchange and auctions off the consignment. He ensures that the winning buyer pays the agreed price and takes delivery, and in return, receives a commission, usually 1 percent of the selling price, plus warehousing charges and other fees.

An electronic system is particularly attractive to large tea companies, like Tata, the Indian conglomerate that owns Tetley brand tea, and Hindustan Unilever, the Indian arm of the international consumer products company Unilever, which owns the brand PG Tips.

Collectively, these two companies control about 45 percent of the market. They have been pushing for the electronic auctions.

Tata hopes the computerized system will allow it to better coordinate its purchasing efforts nationwide and save on labor costs, according to Kevin Paul, a senior manager in the exports division of Tata Tea. The auction system may also give an advantage to large purchasers by making it more difficult to split lots, a practice in which several small buyers team up to jointly purchase a single large batch of tea.

For that and other reasons, many smaller buyers are fearful — especially those who act as bidding agents for distant tea companies. “If their principals are in a position to bid from hometowns anywhere in India their role would be minimized,” said Jayanta Kakati, the secretary of the Guwahati Tea Auction Center.

Eventually, the nine separate auction centers might be consolidated, perhaps resulting in a single national spot market.

Brokers are concerned, too. Some say that an electronic exchange will allow planters and factories to bypass them and sell directly to the market, although they are quick to point out that tea, unlike many other agricultural goods, is not a true commodity.

Each batch of tea is unique and buyers must sample it to know the quality of what they are buying, making tea more akin to fine wine — where the vineyard, the soil and the weather all play vital roles — than it is to winter wheat or pork bellies.

“We will have to change but there will always be a requirement for someone to assess the quality of the tea, make proper cataloging of tea,” said Bikram Barua, director of Contemporary Brokers, one of north India’s largest tea traders. “For that, I don’t see that the broker will disappear.”

But India’s tea brokers are right to worry, said Benn Steil, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “It is very hard for firms and individuals specialized in floor trading to adapt to electronic markets,” Mr. Steil said, noting the difficulties that many specialist firms trading on the New York Stock Exchange have encountered since electronic trading was introduced last year.

Even some buyers who support the electronic market say they have concerns about its design. For instance, they worry that entire tea catalogs may be offered for sale simultaneously. Some tea buyers say they prefer a serial auction, where lots are offered one at a time, because this allows them to adjust their bids to obtain enough of the right kinds of tea to maintain a consistent taste in their tea blends.

This is India’s second major attempt at electronic tea trading. In 2005, the Tea Board mandated that all tea auctions be conducted electronically, but the trading platform the board purchased from I.B.M. was plagued by software failures and within a year the entire system was abandoned. I.B.M. did not return calls seeking comment over several weeks.

An Internet start-up called teauction.com also tried to offer online auctions earlier this decade, but it never gained much trading volume and shut down.

Indian authorities say this time will be different. The latest exchange is being designed by NSE-IT, a branch of India’s national stock exchange that specializes in designing trading platforms. The Tea Board plans to roll out the system in Calcutta, where the first Indian tea auctions began, by December, with the software being introduced to other auction centers over the following three months.

At first, although the trading will be conducted by computer, buyers and brokers will still have to be present at the exchange. But if the system performs well, according to Mr. Kakati, it will be opened up for remote trading over the Internet.

Older tea traders, many of whom are not computer literate, already speak wistfully of the auction floor, as if it were already gone.

“We could walk into a trading floor and get the pulse of the market within 5 to 10 minutes — who is buying from which country and why,” said Ulhas Saraf, the head of the Saraf Trading Corporation, a tea company in the southern Indian city of Kochi.

Still, Mr. Saraf, who began trading tea in the 1950s, said he could not stand in the way of progress. “The new generation feels the computer is better,” he said. [New York Times]

Global Overview: Cautious mood stalls equity rally

By Tony Tassell in London and Michael Mackenzie in New York

Published: May 11 2007 18:37 | Last updated: May 11 2007 21:35

The sharp global equity market rally since early March showed signs of stalling this week as profit-taking countered the impact of intense merger and acquisition activity.

Signs that inflationary pressures in the US were moderating helped to spur a rally in equities on Friday after a sell-off on Thursday and that left major US benchmarks mixed for the week, while European equities were modestly weaker.

Likewise, bond markets were largely steady over the week while the dollar made modest gains. Jens Nordvig, senior economist at Goldman Sachs, said after a significant bull run in “risky assets”, it was no big surprise to see a round of profit-taking finally kick in. The S&P 500 index in Wall Street has risen 9.3 per cent since lows in early March

“Against the background of the magnitude of these gains, it would be no surprise either, if we saw the correction continue for a bit longer,” he said. “But there is a big difference between a short-lived phase of repositioning and a more fundamental regime shift. At this stage, we have a hard time pinpointing any catalyst for a regime shift.”

In Europe, the FTSE Euro-first 300 index dropped 0.7 per cent over the week to 1,582.09. By late-afternoon on Wall Street, the S&P 500 index had closed a fraction higher over the week to 1,505.85, thanks to a 1 per cent gain on Friday.

The late rally came as data showed core US producer prices, excluding food and energy, were unchanged last month. Economists had expected a rise of 0.2 per cent. Other data showed US retail sales fell 0.2 per cent in April, below the consensus forecast of 0.4 per cent.

“The data suggest that higher prices are acting as a big drag on consumption, but so far have not pushed up prices of other goods and services,” said Paul Ashworth, economist at Capital Economics.

“We suspect that the housing slump is beginning to have a more marked impact on spending as well. To our minds, that is a recipe for interest rate cuts later this year.” China remained in the headlines as the Shanghai stock market continued to surge. As analysts pointed to bubble-like conditions on the market with frenetic levels of retail investor activity, the Shanghai Composite index passed 4,000 points for the first time, rising 4.7 per cent over the week.

The rise extended gains this year to 50 per cent. On Wednesday, the value of shares traded on China’s markets exceeded that for the rest of Asia – including Japan – combined.

Concerns about the potential for the rally to unravel have seen foreign investors take a more cautious approach to Chinese equities in general. For the week ending May 9, funds that track Chinese equities saw a net outflow of $574m, according to Emerging Portfolio Fund Research.

Stephen Lewis, economist at Insinger de Beaufort, said if the Chinese “asset bubble finally burst”, it would be a potential source of instability for world markets.

“Global investors learnt in February that they could no longer exclude developments in China’s internal markets from daily consideration.

“Then, a sharp correction in the Shanghai equity market’s rising trend triggered setbacks in share prices around the world. That an asset price correction in China should have had such a profound impact in other financial centres [does] not bode well for the likely resilience of global markets in the face of a definitive downturn in Chinese stocks.”

On government bond markets, US Treasuries weakened slightly on Friday in a week when the US Federal Reserve reiterated its main concern was that “inflation would fail to moderate as expected”. The Fed left interest rates on hold at 5.25 per cent.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose 3.6 basis points to 4.676 per cent. In the eurozone, bonds weakened as the European Central Bank signalled it would raise interest rates next month from 3.75 to 4 per cent. The yield on the 10-year bund rose 3 basis points over the week to 4.22 per cent. On currency markets, the dollar rallied, gaining 0.6 per cent to $1.3520 against the euro and 0.5 per cent to $1.9830 against sterling over the week.

Source: FT.com / Markets - Global Overview

---

Oil rises over fears to supply

By Kevin Morrison May 11 2007 21:58

Oil prices extended their gains on Friday after a warning that petroleum inventories in the developed world would fall sharply unless the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries increased output.

The International Energy Agency, the energy watchdog for developed countries, said in its monthly report that Opec needed to boost output in order to lower prices and replenish stockpiles.

The IEA’s plea to Opec coincided with a lowering of the agency’s estimate for non-Opec oil supply growth this year by 100,000 barrels a day to 1m b/d.

The IEA originally estimated non-Opec supply to be 1.7m b/d this year, but that forecast was made in July last year. Other energy analysts estimate non-Opec supply growth to be under 1m b/d.

The IEA said OECD crude inventories had fallen by 930,000 barrels a day in the first quarter, a decline similar to the one seen in the fourth quarter last year.

ICE Brent for June delivery added $1.04 to close at $66.83 a barrel in London afternoon trade, up 2.3 per cent on the week.

June West Texas Intermediate gained 56 cents to settle at $62.37 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, up 0.7 per cent on the week.

Petrol supplies in the US have dropped to a 16-year- low for this time of the year, pushing retail petrol prices above $3 a gallon to near-record levels.

The Paris-based agency left its 2007 oil demand growth forecast unchanged at 1.8 per cent, or 1.5m b/d.

Nymex gasoline futures for June delivery added 2.15 cents to $2.3440 a gallon, up almost 6 per cent on the week, and 46 per cent so far this year.

The US Department of Agriculture raised its forecast for ethanol producers using a record 3.4bn bushels from this year’s crop, up 200m bushels on the USDA forecast made in early March and almost 60 per cent higher than the 2.15m bushels estimated to have been used in the previous crop year.

The USDA said ethanol usage of corn would be more than US corn exports for the first time ever but that it would be lower than the 5.7bn bushels used for animal feed. May corn futures gained 13.25 cents to $3.59 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade.

The USDA forecast wheat stockpiles at the end of the current growing season would fall to their lowest level since the 1981/82 season.

It forecast an increase in wheat demand this year due to farmers switching to wheat from corn for animal feed. CBOT May wheat futures added 3 cents to $4.83 a bushel.

Nickel prices again hovered near their highs, up $700 to $50,700 a tonne on the London Metal Exchange, having reached a peak of $51,650 during the week. However, nickel was down $1,200 on the week.

Source: FT.com / MARKETS / Commodities

---

CME tries sweetener to sway CBOT bid

By Doug Cameron in Phoenix  May 11 2007 23:51

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange on Friday sweetened its bid for the Chicago Board of Trade to about $9.95bn in an effort to head off a competing offer and avoid losing ground in the consolidation of the global derivatives sector.

Source: FT.com / Companies / Financial services