April 06, 2022

• Speculation on farm land is all the rage as food price increases drive profits.
• Land values in the Midwest grain belt have gained 25-30 per cent in the past year while auctions draw intense bidding for available ground.

In the Midwestern state of Iowa, which restricts corporate ownership of farms, the buyer pool last month consisted of 35 per cent investors and 65 per cent farmers, according to the Realtors Land Institute, compared with 18 per cent investors in 2019. The price of Iowa farmland rose by a third between March 2021 and March 2022, the institute said.

Higher land prices have in some cases outstripped farmland’s earnings potential, leading income returns to investors to decline in recent years, according to Nuveen Natural Capital, a division of TIAA.

But total returns, which also include price appreciation, have been strong: for annual cropland they were 11.1 per cent in 2021, according the NCREIF Farmland Index, which tracks holdings of investors including Gladstone, TIAA and Prudential.

• We may be witnessing a fundamental shift in food land ownership in North America. Pension funds have been purchasing agricultural lands overseas, but were stopped from doing so in Saskatchewan in the previous decade. That is likely to change.

About 70 per cent of US farmland is set to change hands in the next 20 years, according to the US Department of Agriculture, and institutional investors are poised to gain a bigger share as old farmers retire.

• Then there is the fertilizer costs and covid lockdowns in China

According to official data, as many as a third of farmers in northeastern Jilin, Liaoning and Heilongjiang provinces have insufficient agricultural inputs after authorities sealed off villages to fight the pandemic. The three provinces account for more than 20 per cent of China’s grain production.

China reported 20,472 new Covid-19 cases for Tuesday, driven by surging infections in Shanghai where local officials are building the world’s largest makeshift isolation facility to help contain the outbreak there.

The National Exhibition and Convention Center, a 1.2 million square-meter space known for hosting international auto shows and other massive events, will be converted to house more than 40,000 people, according to local media reports

• Oklahoma has passed an abortion ban following the Texas ban.
• Between September and December of last year 5,574 women travelled from Texas to abortion clinics in seven nearby states. Compares with 514 women in the same period in 2019, the most recent pre-pandemic year.

US politics being what they are, it is hard to explain the disconnect with some of the reporting. Rights to do whatever you want – so long as you are a man with a gun (or covid) – and religion's oppressive hand make strange bedfellows.

• Number of sexual misconduct reports at UBC up 83% in 1 year.
• Reporting process change pointed to as reason.
• Reporting still well below actual number of incidents.
• Universities continue to attempt to make it difficult to publicly report on sexual assaults on campus.
• https://bog3.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2022/03/9_2022.03_Annual-Report-from-the-UBC-Investigations-Office-IO.pdf

This, she said, could be a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic which saw the office move more of its services online. Stanhope said the new setup allows alleged victims to attend investigation interviews virtually where they can tell their story at their own pace without cross-examination by the respondent or their legal counsel.

• Uber has unveiled the part of the app it had put on hold as the pandemic hit. The goal is for the app to become the one stop shop in travel planning. Public transport companies that have partnered with the company in receipt of meager funding promises have allowed this to happen.
• Uber had added electric bikes and London Underground links to its UK app in 2019.

• This is all happening as San Francisco – the birth place of Uber culture – has recently abandoned it.

Uber has not disclosed whether it plans to offer tickets from rail and coach operators directly or partner with existing aggregator services when the service goes live this summer. Flight bookings will launch later in the year, Heywood said, and hotel reservations could follow next year. However, the ability to purchase tickets for public transport has largely been limited to one-off experiments such as shared minibuses in Egypt or the Thames commuter ferry in London, which was rebranded Uber Boat in 2020.

Research by Carnegie Mellon University shows that Ubers and Lyfts produce 20 per cent more greenhouse gas emissions than personal vehicles because they spend so much time driving around to collect passengers.

Lael Brainard, who is lined up to be Fed vice-chair and has been dovish on monetary policy in the past, on Tuesday said “rapid” reduction of the Fed balance sheet could start in May. She made various other hawkish noises, as well. This is a big deal. Bond yields rose and stocks fell.

• No indication that QE rollbacks will do much other than people believe that they will do something.

  Last time the central bank attempted to reduce its balance sheet, in 2018-19, 10-year yields fell, the opposite of what the traditional theory would predict.

• Basically, QE drives money accessibility. Reducing QE simply removes available money for bank speculation on themselves. It does little to provide opportunities for profit from investing in production since bank profits do not really filter down to regular people.

• Peru, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, Spain, Germany, UK are specific examples of protests around costs.
• Spanish private truckers have caused shortages with protests against gas price increases.

One cannot forget that cost-driven protests in the Global South (Peru here, is a classic example) are used opportunistically by the US-supported opposition. It is why "inflation" is such a bad word in Latin America. However, protests in Spain, Germany, and UK – while not at the scale of needing curfews (yet?) can be used by opposition forces too. France is in the midst of a presidential election that is being affected by Macron's insistence of making life more expensive for the French.

“We believe Castillo is unlikely to finish his term, which runs until 2026, and he will either be removed from office or resign,” Moody’s Investors Service analysts led by Jaime Reusche wrote in an April 4 note. But, “we also expect that Peru’s orthodox macroeconomic policy framework will continue to underpin the country’s creditworthiness.”

Consumer prices in Lima rose 6.82% in March from a year earlier, the most since August 1998, and well above the central bank’s target of 2%, plus or minus 1 percentage point. Prices climbed 1.48% from February, above the median forecast for a 0.92% increase in a Bloomberg survey of economists.

L’Atelier BNP Paribas used data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and national governments to construct its index.

With economic gains concentrated among a relatively small group and others struggling with basic living expenses, the U.K. “is failing to provide an economy able to support the core promise of equitably distributed, merit based social mobility that is integral to a healthy capitalist democracy in the medium to long term,” the report said.

Despite being the fifth largest economy on the world with solid headline GDP growth, the U.K. is at risk of “social unrest, protest and extremism,” the report said.

In the US, it is not much better. Housing mortgage rates have blown past 5%. Investors seem to be worried:

• study, which has been published in Science of the Total Environment, found 39 microplastics in 11 of the 13 lung tissue samples tested - considerably higher than any previous laboratory tests.
• Of the microplastics detected, there were 12 types, which are commonly found in packaging, bottles, clothing, rope/twine, and many manufacturing processes.

The study follows research published in March by the University of Hull and Hull York Medical School in which scientists recorded high levels of atmospheric microplastics during a year-long study at a site close to a busy northern trunk road.

Researchers found the most abundant microplastics were polyethylene from, for example, degraded plastic packaging or carrier bags; nylon, which may be from clothes; as well as resins, which could come from degraded roads, paint marking or tyre rubber.