News

May 17 (Bloomberg) — Bill Gates is once again the world’s richest person.
The 57-year-old co-founder of Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft Corp. recaptured the title from Mexican investor Carlos Slim yesterday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, as the software maker hit a five-year high. It is the first time Gates has held the mantle since 2007. His fortune is valued at $72.7 billion, up 16 percent year-to-date.
Slim’s America Movil SAB, the largest mobile-phone operator in the Americas, has dropped 14 percent this year after Mexico’s Congress passed a bill that could quash the billionaire’s market dominance. That’s helped erase more than $3 billion from the 73- year-old tycoon’s net worth.
“When they’re talking about reform in a country that’s generally poor, and the guy shows up No. 1 on the list — not a good thing,” said Greg Lesko, managing director at New York- based Deltec Asset Management LLC, which oversees $750 million and has an “underweight” position in Slim’s flagship company. “He’s had a pretty good monopoly situation in Mexico, and the Mexican cellphone user has been paying more than he should. We applaud it for the country.”
Earlier this month, a group of kazoo-playing protesters confronted Slim when he appeared at an event at the New York Public Library, denouncing him for overcharging consumers to enrich himself. He denies the accusation.

Microsoft Rally
The bill passed in Mexico last month, which is backed by President Enrique Pena Nieto and is now before state legislatures, would allow regulators to break up phone companies with more than 50 percent of the market or force them to share their networks. America Movil has 70 percent of Mexico’s mobile- phone subscribers and 80 percent of the country’s landlines.
Microsoft shares have surged 28 percent this year, buoyed by cost controls and sales of business and server software amid weak demand for personal computers running the new Windows 8 operating system. Gates’s fortune has also benefited from a rally in stock holdings that include the Canadian National Railway Co. and waste-collection company Republic Services Inc.
Most of Gates’s fortune is held in Cascade Investment LLC, a holding entity through which he owns stakes in more than a dozen publicly traded companies and several closely held operations, including Four Seasons hotels and Corbis Corp. Less than a quarter of Gates’s fortune is held in Microsoft. He’s donated $28 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Bridgitt Arnold, a spokeswoman for Gates, declined to comment. Arturo Elias, Slim’s spokesman, didn’t return phone and e-mail messages.
Buffett, Ortega
Berkshire Hathaway Inc. chairman Warren Buffett is the world’s third-richest person with $59.7 billion, according to the Bloomberg ranking. He is $3.7 billion ahead of Spaniard Amancio Ortega, Europe’s wealthiest person.
Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, ranks fifth with a $55.6 billion fortune. The world’s largest furniture retailer generated more than $36 billion in revenue and $4 billion in net income in 2012.
Google Inc. co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have seen their fortunes rise more than 22 percent year-to-date as shares of the world’s most […]

May 8, 2013

Source: University Of Illinois news release

Farm Bill markup likely will begin soon in both the Senate and House Agricultural committees. Much of the focus for traditional program crops will be around three programs: a revenue program, a target price program, and a supplemental crop insurance program.

While the exact nature of the programs will depend on negotiations, what is almost certain is that the programs’ rationale will be risk management. Given a risk management focus, Farm Bill negotiations will need to debate and somehow resolve the following seven questions.

Question 1: Will support provided to some crops be greater than the support provided strictly by risk management considerations?

Risk management programs provide a level of payments that more closely follows gross revenue than do the historical Farm Bill Title 1 programs. For example, a continuation of the current direct payment program results in higher payments for rice and peanuts than for corn, soybeans, and wheat. Modifications of the risk management focus may be needed to gain political support for differing regions and crops.

Preferential treatment can be implemented by various measures. For a revenue program, minimum prices could be put in place, as was done for rice and peanuts in the 2012 Senate Farm Bill.

Target prices can be set higher relative to expected market prices for some crops than other crops, as was done for rice and peanuts in last year’s House Agricultural Committee Farm Bill.

In a supplemental crop insurance program, higher subsidy levels and higher loss multiples can be given to some crops over other crops, as was done for cotton in their STAX program compared to the Supplemental Coverage Option (SCO) proposed for other program crops in the 2012 Senate Farm Bill and 2012 House Agricultural Committee Farm Bill.

Question 2: Will the programs focus on across-year or on within-year protection?

A supplemental crop insurance program will enhance crop insurance protection, thereby increasing within-year protection. A revenue and target price program respectively protect against revenue and price declines that occur across years.

Because all three of the programs must fit within budget parameters, the greater the focus on a supplemental insurance program the lower will be across-year protection, and vice versa.

The discussion in the preceding paragraph presumes that the supplemental insurance coverage provided by STAX and SCO programs is the same proposed in last year’s Farm Bill drafts. Both of these programs based their revenue guarantees on crop insurance’s pre-plant projected prices.

These projected prices are based on harvest futures prices for the crop year. This design choice results only in within-year protection. An alternative design option is to base prices on historical prices, which would introduce the potential for across-year protection.

Question 3: Will the across-year programs focus on price or revenue protection?

It is easier to forecast payments with a price program. Prices lower than the support price will results in payments.

In contrast, payments by a revenue program depend on low revenue not low price. Low prices may be […]

April 23, 2013
by Derrell S. Peel, Oklahoma State University Extension Livestock Marketing Specialist
There seems to be a chill on cattle markets…both literally and figuratively. Cattle markets remain hunkered down due to weather and other impacts. The unrelenting cold, wet spring continues to have a variety of impacts on both the supply and demand sides of cattle and beef markets. Domestic beef demand is stagnant and certainly seems to be lacking the seasonal push that usually accompanies warm weather.
Choice boxed beef cutout has been hovering near the $190/cwt. range with little sense of direction the past three weeks. The Choice-Select Spread has widened seasonally but is the result of weaker Select values rather than strength in Choice values. International demand for U.S. beef has also weakened amid Russian concerns with Ractopamine and weakness in major markets, such as Mexico, where relatively high U.S. beef values have been aggravated by a somewhat stronger dollar since January.
There is growing evidence that extended cold weather has increased beef cow liquidation. Total beef cow slaughter has been up 11.1% the last 4 weeks after declining early in the year. Year to date beef cow slaughter is now down a scant 3.7% from last year. Increased beef cow slaughter appears to be regionally widespread, though regional slaughter data are incomplete. In Region 6, the Southern Plains, beef cow slaughter has been up 15.2% the last four weeks but is still down nearly 12% for the year to date. Oklahoma auction data confirms the recent increase in cow culling as cow and bull volumes in federally reported auctions have been up nearly 23% since mid-March after declining over 24% from January through mid-March.
The latest Cattle on Feed report also suggests weather impacts on feeder markets. Unexpectedly large March feedlot placements were largely concentrated in Texas and Kansas. The Kansas placements were mostly heavy weight feeders from winter backgrounding programs. In contrast, the Texas placements were spread across lightweight to heavier feeder cattle and were likely partly the result of drought induced sales. Some may have been directly from cow-calf liquidations and others the result of forage shortages in winter stocker programs. The fact that large placements occurred in conjunction with weak feeder cattle prices suggests that the movement was more of a supply driven market situation rather than demand driven.
The Cattle on Feed numbers may also suggest implications for the broader cow herd. The number of heifers on feed has fallen sharply since the middle of 2012. The April 1 heifer on feed inventory was down 7.6% year over year. However, this value is less of a decrease than the January 1 heifer on-feed total, which was down 9.5% from the previous year. This likely indicates that much of the increased feedlot placements were heifers, probably including some heifers designated as replacements in the January inventory report. The combination of increased beef cow slaughter and relatively more heifers on feed at this point likely means that any prospects to avoid […]