David Fuller and Eoin Treacy's Comment of the Day
Category - General

    Wheat Climbs After Another Russian Missile Attack on Odesa Port

    This article from Bloomberg may be of interest. Here is a section:

    The world still has a large buffer of wheat stockpiles, and top shipper Russia continues to export its own bumper crop to world markets. About 33 million tons of crops were shipped to global destinations under the pact, including about 17 million tons of corn and nine million tons of wheat. The top destination was China, followed by Spain, Turkey, Italy and the Netherlands.

    Elsewhere, lack of rains and heat are threatening crops in parts of the US and southern Europe, increasing risks to food supplies. Still, wheat futures have fallen by almost half from the record reached in March last year to $7.10 a bushel. That compares with an average of $5.82 over the past 10 years.

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    A Bug Exterminator That Trades Like Nvidia

    This article from Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    None of this bodes particularly well for humanity, of course, and there are signs that the warming climate could increase the demand for pest control even further into new areas. The termite population is getting hungrier. The mosquito season is growing longer. And some bugs, including the German cockroaches, are losing their sensitivity to existing pesticides. One way or another, Americans — led by those newly christened Floridians and Texas that arrived in the past several years — are going to have to learn to live in a world full of unpleasant critters, and that’s likely to add to the extermination industry’s reputation as a recession-proof juggernaut.

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    Sunak Suffers Twin Election Blows in Effort to Revive Tory Hopes

    This article from Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    Sunak and his team had downplayed their chances in the three special elections in very different districts, arguing that even winning one would represent a victory given governments are often given a kicking in mid-term votes. The prime minister is eyeing holding the next national vote in November 2024 to allow Britain’s ailing economy as much time as possible to recover, a person familiar with his thinking told Bloomberg. 

    Economic data has begun to turn this week with a bigger-than-expected inflation drop, while figures published Friday show government borrowing undershot official forecasts — potentially giving Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt room for tax cuts.

    The prime minister told reporters in Uxbridge the Conservatives will take encouragement from the result there, arguing it shows the outcome of the general election “is not a done deal.” 

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    Chaos, Dysfunction Force South Africa to Lean on Private Sector

    This article from Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    Like Discovery, which also pays for some of the fire engines in the South African commercial capital, precious metals producer Sibanye-Stillwater Ltd. ensures that water near its mines is safe to drink and roads are maintained and well lit; it upgrades schools and clinics. Food producer Tiger Brands secures water supply for the town that’s home to its fruit-processing business, and Investec Plc powers a traffic light near its offices during blackouts in Johannesburg. Glencore Plc, Anglo American Plc spinoff Thungela Resources Ltd. and other owners of an export terminal spend about $1 million a month to protect trains transporting their coal from cable thieves. 

    “It’s not altruism,” said Lungisa Fuzile, chief executive officer of the South African unit of Standard Bank Group Ltd., the continent’s biggest lender. “You can’t run a successful private business in a sea of chaos.”

    Government incompetence, corruption and policy paralysis have left critical infrastructure in Africa’s most-industrialized nation in tatters, forcing companies to step into areas that are within the purview of the state in most countries. 

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    Cocoa Factories Slowing Down Spell Trouble for Chocolate Makers

    This article for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    “The demand issues are multifold,” said Judy Ganes, president of consultancy J. Ganes Consulting, who has followed the market for more than 30 years. “There’s not just cocoa prices that are high, but sugar prices are also high, and manufacturers always look for ways to meet margins and work to put fewer chocolate chips in a cookie, or they shrink the bar sizes.”

    Factories usually process cocoa several months before products are turned into chocolate. That means the slowdown likely signals the industry is expecting less demand ahead. Barry Callebaut AG, the world’s largest maker of bulk chocolate, said earlier this month that its sales volume fell 2.7% in the first nine months of the year, with its gourmet and specialists’ business seeing the biggest drop. 
     

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    Startup Cerebras Takes on Nvidia With Chain of AI Supercomputers

    This is the second news story I’ve seen in the last day talking about companies developing work arounds for reliance on Nvidia’s chips. Here is a section:

    The new supercomputers will be operated by Cerebras and used for G42 projects. Any excess capacity will offered commercially as a service. 

    For Cerebras, based in Silicon Valley, the new systems provide a showcase that it hopes will lead to wider adoption. The company’s offerings rely on massive chips that are made out of whole silicon wafers — disks that are normally sliced up to create multiple components.

    Feldman argues that his processors have the advantage of being able to deal with large data sets in one go, rather than only working on portions of the information at a time. Compared with Nvidia’s processors, they also require less of the complicated software needed to make chips work in concert, he said. 

    This year, cloud computing providers such as Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc.’s AWS have been stocking up on Nvidia processors to keep up with runaway demand for OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other generative AI tools. Nvidia has about 80% of the market for the so-called accelerators that help handle these workloads. 

    With his computing rollout, Feldman aims to demonstrate that the AI explosion won’t just benefit the giant tech companies that can afford big-budget equipment.

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    Brazil's All-Powerful Sugar Industry Sours the Country on EVs

    This article from Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    So far, Lula’s government is trying to support both technologies in a precarious balancing act. To appease the sugar industry, it will keep incentives for ethanol in place while simultaneously courting electric-car makers from China scouting new overseas factory sites with a compelling sales pitch: proximity to local battery-metal deposits, a growing domestic middle class and access to other Latin American markets with their own discretionary incomes to spend. It has worked, with at least two of China’s biggest carmakers — BYD Co. and Great Wall Motor Co. — planning to bring their vehicle production to the country’s shores. But even they plan to add some ethanol-fueled hybrids to their Brazilian lineups in what looks like a friendly — and savvy — gesture.

    The discussion about electric cars is “very important for Brazil and for the world,” said Renan Filho, Brazil’s transport minister. But ethanol should be part of the conversation, too, he said. “Ethanol emits much less.”

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