Food Inflation

Sorry for not posting for a few days but the weekly foot of new snow around here put a big crimp in the schedule.

Aside from another Nobel prize winner getting jailed (El Baradei in Egypt after Liu in China), the big story around the world still has to be food prices. That's one of the reason cited for the riots in Tnisia and Egypt. To the charts:

 Corn - bull market and no mention of the evil speculators of 2008.

 Wheat - resistance breakout.

 

Livestock ETF - cattle and hogs have a breakout

Rice -knocking on the door of a breakout after a nice bull flag.

That covers the mainstays of just about every ethnic diet (soybeans looks like corn).  Where will the next riot be?

Shipping lead vs lag

Today's Barron's Online column talked about the decline of shipping stocks and the Baltic Dry Index (BDI), which keeps tabs on how much it costs to hire those mega-behemoth tanker ships.  The theory is that falling demand means lower shipping prices and then lower stock prices.  I even saw someone overlay the BDI witht he S&P 500 and the Shanghai composite. Excellent hypothesis, especially with China gobbling up all the raw materials and shipping their finished crap back to us.

Without disparaging anyone else's work, the falling in the BDI does not provide the reason for deflation. Stocks are up but the index is way down so you'd think stocks would correct towards the BDI. 

 
Chart lifted from Seeking Alpha but totally reproducable on your own via the free Stockscharts.com.

I think the divergence between the BDI and stock prices means the opposite. First of all, the correlation here is limited. But if we assume it is good, to me it is stocks that lead the BDI and not the other way around. That is another of my arguments for inflation, not deflation in the coming years.