17 But to a physicist there is no such thing as nothing. Empty space is instead filled with pairs of particles and antiparticles, called virtual particles, that quickly form and then, in accordance with the law of energy conservation, annihilate each other in about 10-25 second.

18 So Aristotle was right all along.

19 These virtual particles popping in and out of existence create energy. In fact, according to quantum mechanics, the energy contained in all the power plants and nuclear weapons in the world doesn’t equal the theoretical energy contained in the empty spaces between these words.

Labels: fun, physics

It's been a rough start to the fall for British farmers, with reports of sporadic cases of BSE (mad cow disease) and more cases of foot-and-mouth disease. And then on Friday, British public health officials officially pronounced an outbreak of bluetongue disease among the nation's cattle. So what makes British cattle so sickly?

Heathrow Airport. Agriculture experts say the outbreaks in the United Kingdom are the result of bad luck more than anything else. But the country does have the distinction of being Europe's primary landing spot for global travel, and that could put livestock at risk. Travelers from every continent pass through London Heathrow Airport (the busiest airport in the world for international traffic), and with them comes food waste from airplanes. Pathology researchers consider airline food waste, which is sometimes processed into food for livestock, the greatest danger to animal health in the world. Airline garbage that's contaminated with foreign diseases can end up in livestock troughs, or it goes to landfills where it might infect wild animals—who could then spread illness to domesticated livestock.

It's also possible that British cattle are simply the victims of bad publicity. Most European countries, as well as nations in Africa, Asia, and North America, have had confirmed cases of the three major livestock diseases—mad cow, foot and mouth, and bluetongue. But the United Kingdom happens to have one of the best systems in the world for reporting these outbreaks. Since the country was struck with a devastating BSE epidemic in 1968, British health officials have developed a surveillance network with a very high degree of transparency. This ensures that individual cases of diseases are immediately reported to the government, and appropriate action is taken. So the British cattle may not be any more sickly than those in other parts of the world; they might just be getting watched a bit more closely. [More possible reasons]

Labels: health, international, livestock

A new pilot program recently approved by the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation (FCIC) will provide farmers an opportunity to pay lower premiums if they plant a majority of their corn acres using hybrid seeds that feature YieldGard Plus® with Roundup Ready® Corn 2 or YieldGard VT Triple™ technology from Monsanto Company (NYSE: MON).

The insurance product will be offered as a pilot program in cooperation with Western Agricultural Insurance Company and will be called the Biotech Yield Endorsement (BYE). Western Agricultural Insurance will make the program available to all other approved insurance providers to offer to their farmer customers.

The pilot program will be initially available in four states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and Minnesota. Implementation of BYE has yet to be determined pending available resources and priorities for the deployment and administration of the program by the Risk Management Agency (RMA).

To be eligible for the program, a farmer must plant 75 to 80 percent of their corn acres with seeds featuring YieldGard Plus with Roundup Ready Corn 2 or YieldGard VT Triple technology. Refuge requirements must also be respected. Depending on the grower's production history, amount of coverage purchased and other criteria, the farmer may be able to reduce the yield component of their premium up to 24 percent. [More]

• This is tacit actuarial proof of decreased production risks. We've all been seeing it in our fields. (Note the happy surprises in the AgWeb Crop Comments.) The number one yield threat - drought - threatens all corn growers less with this technology protection. So, if crop insurance has been a questionable benefit (example: I have only ever carried CAT coverage because of a FSA grain bin loan), it is a true loser now. I know many of you can't imagine farming without CI, but some of you probably could now, especially if you sock the saved premiums away for a "rainless day".
  
• Insurance companies are probably not thrilled (more on this in a later post). The farm bill drafts are squeezing their profits - which have been handsome lately - and now premiums will drop because of seed choice. Monsanto has unilaterally transferred a risk premium from crop insurers to seed - and can legitimately capture that value. If it doesn't support an actual price increase, it will justify current boosts. This is superb business practice, and Monsanto is displaying again why they currently have no match in the seed/technology marketplace.
• I bet rotary hoe sales jump and prices for old hoes increase sharply. Stay with me on this one. It seems to me the biggest risk now is having to replant. Even with a break on seed costs, you still pay the tech fees (now enormous) on replant seed. Slapping corn in the ground willy-nilly now carries one of the higher penalties even as the production boost to early planting may be decreasing. Free replant seed should be a big factor in hybrid seed choice. Ditto with waiting an extra day or not planting just ahead of a downpour.
• This trend is not over. The (in my opinion) over-hyped pipelines just might offer more production-stabilizing technology that should make crop insurance premiums less by reducing payouts.
  

Labels: economics, insurance, production

Google and advertisers drool over the growth potential in wireless. The more than 2 1/2 billion phones in use worldwide exceed the number of PCs and TVs combined. On Sept. 17, Google announced a Web program aimed at advertisers who have created sites for display on cell phones and other handheld devices. Like its online ad network, Google's AdSense for Mobile delivers ads relevant to the advertiser's mobile audience. "The sheer volume of users across the globe makes mobile the next channel for information," says Dilip Venkatachari, director of product management for Google's mobile team. [More] [My emphasis]

Labels: culture, technology

This week, motorcycle enthusiast Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor of the New York Times, said that his department is starting a new blog, "The Board." It'll join the paper's 14 other Opinion section blogs, including the Opinionator, which discusses the op-ed pages of other newspapers and will benefit from being freed from the Times now-dead paywall, TimesSelect. The Times looks to be the newspaper blog leader—they have 40 active blogs, not counting seasonal blogs like David Carr's movie awards season craziness, beating the Guardian with 18, the New York Daily News with 22, the Wall Street Journal with 16 active blogs, the Los Angeles Times with 27, the San Francisco Chronicle with 26, the Miami Herald with 31, and the Chicago Tribune with 33, for a random sampling. But. Do you read any of these blogs? [More]

Labels: blog, media

But when it comes to referring to the nation in English, there's little debate. Myanmar is the name invented 18 years ago by the benighted junta, known as SLORC* back then and the State Peace and Development Council now, when it seized power through force. When Westerners say "Myanmar," they're not being culturally respectful to the people of a beautiful but oppressed nation. (We don't call China Zhongguo or Germany Deutschland just because the locals do.) They're bowing to the whims of the generals who still imprison Aung San Suu Kyi.

There is no reason to humor them. Say Burma, as George Bush did. And CNN, grow some backbone when it comes to terminology! [More]

Labels: culture, international

But Conrad is a relentless political operator who never quits. And that’s the pity. Harkin is an idea man with a progressive vision of where U.S. agriculture is going and what the farm bill should look like. But as the weeks drag on and Senate work on the farm bill is delayed, he seems increasingly hemmed in by Conrad’s aggressive tactics and the real politik of Senate dealing making.

He acknowledged as much Tuesday in one of his regular teleconferences with reporters. While he still held out hopes for what he said would be “very modest” reforms of the basic subsidy programs, he twice noted that he was limited by “the art of the possible,” i.e., he can’t move a bill out of his committee without votes from hardline advocates of traditional subsidies. [More]

* If there is a payment limit for farmers with an average gross income (AGI) of $200,000 that the Bush administration has suggested, or the $1 million limit in the House farm bill, why not pay those farmers up to that point of the limit? Why take an all-or-nothing approach?

"Remember," Conner said, "our approach is $200,000 averaged over three years. So I don't see that as all or nothing. This is a sustained person who is in the top 2.3 percent of tax filers in America -- of all tax filers. We understand there are boom and bust years, and there is always going to be, so it may not be fair if you just happen to hit a great year, and maybe even marketing even more than one crop in a particular year because of the price situation, that one year would throw a producer out. But if you manage to do that over a period of three years, you are just flat out one of the top income people in the United States of America. As we have said time and time again, we do believe that if you reach a point where you've realized the American dream to the fullest extent, and again, if you're one of the top income earners in America, you need to graduate. These programs today are income support programs."
[More by ProFarmer subscription]

Labels: farm bill, politics

Labels: fun

Since 2001, we and just about every other business publication have written stories on the coming nuclear renaissance. It’s a development that was seen as almost inevitable. The country needs more electricity. And with coal plants being blocked or cancelled because of concerns over global warming, nukes were looking more and more attractive. Sure, there are still lingering worries over waste disposal and nuclear proliferation, but the new generation of plants are safer and, the industry expected, cheaper to build. The question was, who would take the first leap? Now we have an answer. It’s a Princeton, NJ-based utility named NRG. On Sept. 24, the company and South Texas Project Nuclear Operating Company filed an application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build two new nuclear units at the site of two existing nukes in Texas. "We think the nuclear renaissance is finally upon us," says NRG CEO David Crane. [More]

NRG has chosen Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR) technology for the new units to be built at the STP site. The 12,220-acre site and 7,000-acre cooling reservoir were originally designed for four units. The two new units will be built adjacent to the currently operating STP units 1 and 2. ABWR technology is certified by the NRC and has an impressive construction and operational track record. This includes setting world records for construction time and bringing the units in on budget. Four ABWR units have been successfully commissioned in Japan, with another three units under construction in Taiwan and Japan. The Tokyo Electric Power Company, Inc. has more than a decade of experience in ABWR operations and has provided their expertise to supporting STP’s planned two-unit expansion. [More]

Labels: energy, environment

Toyota Motor Co. will recall 55,000 floor mats due to complaints of unintended acceleration caused by the mats sticking underneath the accelerator pedal, federal safety officials and the automaker said Wednesday.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration took the unusual step of highlighting Toyota’s recall announcement, advising owners of other Toyota models – including the Prius hybrid and Avalon sedans – to ensure their floor mats are properly installed.

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“We have also received complaints about the RAV 4 (crossover) and Tacoma (pickup),” said Rae Tyson, a spokesman for NHTSA. “We will continue to monitor all of the other Toyota vehicles not involved in the recall." [More]

Labels: fun

2) The blog reports of the Schulte piece misrepresent the research question that we originally posed. It was, "How many papers published in referred journals disagree with the statement, "...most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations"? This statement came from the IPCC (2001) and was reiterated explicitly by the 2001 NAS report, so we wanted to know how many papers diverged from that consensus position. The answer was none. The Schulte claim does not refutes that. [More]
[My emphasis]

Labels: environment, global warming

If enough people did not take up the exit grants, further increases to the asset test could be made, he said.

University of Adelaide water expert Mike Young said measures to assist farmers move off the land represented a significant shift in attitudes to primary production.

"An important signal is being sent to everybody to make them think about whether or not it is appropriate to remain in agriculture," he said.

"We're now trying to farm and irrigate in a drier regime. A lot of the practices that have been in place won't work in the future unless it rains again."

James Stacey, a dairy farmer from Langhorne Creek in South Australia, said the asset limit was unrealistic for farmers in the Murray-Darling Basin who might want the exit grants but had valuable water licenses putting them above the $350,000 mark.

"I think a lot of people along the Murray system would think about it seriously, and that includes dairy farmers from NSW, Victoria and South Australia," he said. "The problem is, everyone is asset rich and cash poor."

Mr Stacey, who has applied for an exceptional circumstances interest rate subsidy, has been forced to sell his calves born this year because of high feed costs. [More]

Labels: international, weather

Labels: culture

Corrêa de Barros warned the EU Farm Council that "The current EU GM policy will cripple the EU livestock industry.

"Livestock producers in third countries will be able to use the GMO crops not yet approved in the EU to feed their animals and will increasingly sell their products of animal origin to EU consumers at a lower price compared with EU operators".

He stressed that the systematic slowdown of GM approvals in the EU combined with a strict 0-tolerance policy for the presence of non EU-approved materials already resulted in the loss of 4 million tonnes of CGF (Corn Gluten Feed) and DDGS (Dried Distillers Grains with Solubles) that the EU used to import for years from the US. [More]

This next farm bill will be critical, and the ethanolics could use the support of the environmental lobby, which enjoys the Times’ editorial ear. My money is still with the corn guys, despite the obvious problems delineated by the Times editorial and about a jillion cattle feeders.

More people are beginning to look at the science and wonder if ethanol is really a prudent approach to energy conservation. You get a different answer, of course, from the ethanol folks—but they must be worried about the momentum shift.

It strikes me as a little bit blind like a bat to argue that ethanol production isn’t affecting food prices, much less sport a headline like RFA’s “NEW REPORT: FOOD AND MEAT PROCESSORS USING "ETHANOL SMOKESCREEN"

Of course ethanol has increased corn prices, and of course that increases meat prices. Geez. As sure as the price of water affects the price of ice. As sure as the price of barbers affects the price of haircuts. As sure as How can you argue that? [More]

The dramatic increase in the use of crops for fuel is going to increase food prices, at least for the next several years. The magnitude of that increase however, may not be as large as some expect. Probably the three most important reasons why the impact will not be as large as in past years are: 1.) the share of the retail food dollar contributed by the farm level commodity value has been sharply reduced to just 20 percent today; 2.) the importance of food in consumer budgets has continued to drop such that the "food and beverage" category in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is now weighted at just 15 percent; and 3.) the sources of our food are more global and diverse than in the past.

Retail level food prices are expected to increase an additional 1.2 percent to 1.8 percent above their 2006 level due to higher farm-level grain and commodity prices partially attributable to the use of grains and oilseeds for biofuels. This will roughly parallel the calendar years of 2007 and 2008. This analysis is based upon the assumption that higher farm-level commodity prices are eventually passed to retail food consumers. Our assumption is that transferal is dollar for dollar. Not all of the current increased food inflation is attributable to increased use of crops for energy, as poor weather conditions have also contributed to poor world wheat crops in 2006, and to losses of some fruit and vegetable production in 2007. [More]

Labels: ethanol, food, policy

The study showed increased levels of nitrogen and phosphorus cause sharp hikes in the abundance and reproduction of a snail species that hosts microscopic parasites known as trematodes, said Assistant Professor Pieter Johnson of CU-Boulder's ecology and evolutionary biology department.

The nutrients stimulate algae growth, increasing snail populations and the number of infectious parasites released by snails into ponds and lakes. The parasites subsequently form cysts in the developing limbs of tadpoles causing missing limbs, extra limbs and other severe malformations, Johnson said.

"This is the first study to show that nutrient enrichment drives the abundance of these parasites, increasing levels of amphibian infection and subsequent malformations," said Johnson. "The research has implications for both worldwide amphibian declines and for a wide array of diseases potentially linked to nutrient pollution, including cholera, malaria, West Nile virus and diseases affecting coral reefs." [More]

Labels: environment, production

Americans are driving cars that get better mileage, and more are driving vehicles that use fuels taxed at lower rates than gasoline, such as ethanol, or making their own fuel and not being taxed. That means gas tax revenue isn't growing nearly as fast as the number of miles driven.

In addition, the costs of road construction materials have skyrocketed because of heavy demand from India and China. Congress and many state legislatures are reluctant to increase gas taxes, especially at a time of high prices at the pump. The federal gas tax of 18.4 cents a gallon has not been increased since 1993; 24 states have not raised their gas taxes since 1997, according to the American Road & Transportation Builders Association.

That has made a mileage fee more attractive to some agencies. The University of Iowa study is funded by the Federal Highway Administration and 15 state departments of transportation. [More]

Labels: ethanol, taxes

Bush is trying to establish that he's a fiscal conservative after overseeing a sharp rise in the deficit, said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois.

"I think he has picked the wrong issues," Durbin said. "If he wants to fight over children's health insurance, I'm sorry but we're ready."

But Bush said lawmakers "are putting health coverage for poor children at risk so they can score political points in Washington." He and his aides have threatened vetoes on several other matters as well, including House representation for the District of Columbia and subsidized insurance against terrorist acts.

Bush also has threatened to veto nine of the 12 appropriations bills that would fund the government for the fiscal year beginning October 1. [More]

The veto threat came as the House prepared to take up the bill, loaded with $5 billion in new drinking water and wastewater treatment plants proposed by Senate and House negotiators.

"Indeed, it seems a $14 billion Senate bill went into a conference with the House's $15 billion bill and somehow a bill emerged costing approximately $20 billion," complained Rob Portman, the White House budget director, and John Paul Woodley, Jr., the Army's assistant secretary of civil works.

Because the bill's authorization now "significantly exceeds the cost of either the House or Senate bill and contains other unacceptable provisions ... the president will veto the bill," they wrote to four Senate and House members whose committees oversaw the legislation.

Congress must not increase the Army Corps' already huge backlog of $38 billion in authorized projects by adding new ones for wastewater, drinking water, sewer overflows, waterfront development, transportation and abandoned mines - all of which are "outside of and inappropriate for the mission" of the Army Corps, Portman and Woodley wrote. [More]

Given the sudden resurgence of interest in Doha negotiations, the farm bill is a prime target as well, making the imaginative new funding sources being contemplated by both the House and Senate reasons the White House can force Congress to rethink.

Bush is like Capt. Renault in Casablanca, who feigns shock that there is gambling in Rick's Cafe, said Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist and author of Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. "He's suddenly 'shocked, shocked' to find out there's all this pork-barrel spending in these bills," Bartlett said.

Bush's veto strategy "is the only card they've really got to play if they are indeed interested in restraining government spending," says Stephen Slivinski, director of budget studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. That has been "an open question" in the past, he added, but now the threats are aimed at "Democratic bills."

"He dislikes Democrats more than he likes big government," Slivinski said. [More]

The veto remains an incredibly powerful tool for the executive branch - and this is an administration that's all about executive power. Recent public relations Iraq victories have reignited his famed stubbornness, it seems.

Labels: farm bill, politics

I regard this story as curiously parallel to our own defunding of the Mexican truck program–a populist uprising against unpopular regulation. But where we had protectionist Teamsters, they had the “Metric Martyrs”–shopkeepers who violated European Union regulations by continuing to sell things in pounds and ounces and pints instead of in hemidemisemiquavers and hectagons and rectaliters or whatever such Continental barbarities the muscles from Brussels demanded. And they were fined heavily for it.

In 1984, there’s a passage about Socialist metricization being an extension of demoralizing mind control. I remember it concerned an old prole lamenting, over his beer, that a half liter was too little, and a liter was too much, and that he missed his old comfortable pints which had been just right. That’s it exactly. Feet and inches are a likewise a useful, human scale. NOTHING is a meter long. (Or are we supposed to switch to one-third-meter hot dogs at ballgames?) [More]

Labels: EU, fun, trade

Labels: fun

Matt Prescott, a spokesperson for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, asserted last month that "you just cannot be a meat-eating environmentalist." PETA's pronouncement is part of a cooperative campaign among a number of animal-rights groups. Their message is that meat production exacerbates global warming.

PETA will lead the charge by dispatching an operative in a chicken suit to tour the country in a Hummer. The group will also deploy billboards nationwide with a mocking cartoon depicting climate-change hero Al Gore eating a drumstick, next to the words "Too Chicken to Go Vegetarian? Meat Is the No. 1 Cause of Global Warming." PETA's recent bleating has attracted substantial attention, including a recent story in The New York Times. [More]

Labels: environment, food

Labels: beef, food, fun

Britain's deputy chief veterinarian Fred Landeg told British television stations on Saturday that a cow on a cattle and sheep farm near Ipswich, Suffolk, northeast of London, tested positive for bluetongue.

The cow was to be slaughtered, other animals on the farm tested to see if they were also infected, and restrictions put in place at the site, Landeg and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said.

National Farmers Union (NFU) President Peter Kendall told BBC television that bluetongue "is definitely not as serious as foot-and-mouth but it is of major concern to us," as it is one more disease to deal with.

He said the disease is carried by insects like midges and is not transferred from animal to animal. [More]

Labels: beef, production

Labels: fun

But the gonzo cuts can have negative results after the initial frenzy. First, it makes chumps out of the customers who made the product a hit—and profitable at full price—in the first place. Early adopters who paid through the nose for the new iPhone, were iPissed when they realized that their technologically less-forward neighbors could get the exact same product for one-third less a few weeks later. In response to an avalanche of angry e-mails, Jobs responded that he really cut the price in order to help all those who paid $599 for it. "It benefits both Apple and every iPhone user to get as many new customers as possible in the iPhone 'tent.' We strongly believe the $399 price will help us do just that this holiday season." How would you feel if you bought a condo in a Hovnanian development last month, only to find that your new neighbor paid significantly less for the exact same floor plan? [More]

Labels: economy

Labels: fun, health, science

The Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health announced a study linking CCD to Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus. I haven’t found a link to the study itself, which is published in the journal Science, but ScienceDaily has published a summery. The authors of the study claim that the presence of IAPV predicts CCD in a colony with 96% accuracy. In other words, if someone selected a honey bee colony in the US and all they told you about it was whether or not it had IAPV, not how big it was, where it was, what kinds of bees they were, you tell them if it had collapsed or not. If you did this 1000 times and had average luck, you’d be right 960 times.

But we don’t know if it actually causes CCD

That kind of accuracy is pretty amazing and makes IAPV a “significant marker” for CCD, but it doesn’t mean that it causes CCD. It might even be the other way around; CCD weakens a colony that was otherwise able to fend off IAPV, allowing the virus to infect the colony. Or something else causes both CCD and facilitates an IAPV infection. [More]

Who should be surprised that the major media reports forget to tell us that the dying bees are actually hyper-bred varieties that we coax into a larger than normal body size? It sounds just like the beef industry. And, have we here a solution to the vanishing bee problem? Is it one that the CCD Working Group, or indeed, the scientific world at large, will support? Will media coverage affect government action in dealing with this issue?

These are important questions to ask. It is not an uncommonly held opinion that, although this new pattern of bee colony collapse seems to have struck from out of the blue (which suggests a triggering agent), it is likely that some biological limit in the bees has been crossed. There is no shortage of evidence that we have been fast approaching this limit for some time. [More]

Labels: organic, science

The United States is prepared to negotiate a multilateral trade deal on the basis of a WTO proposal calling for big cuts in agriculture subsidies, a government official said Wednesday.

But a spokeswoman for the office of the US Trade Representative, Sean Spicer, said other countries "must step up to ensure the strongest possible market access outcomes" in agriculture as well as manufacturing and services.

The comments in Washington came after a high-ranking WTO official said in Geneva that US officials had accepted WTO proposals as a basis for negotiations.

"They said they were prepared to negotiate within the range of numbers put forward in the agriculture paper, provided everybody else would work within the same parameters," said the WTO's chief agriculture negotiator, New Zealand ambassador Crawford Falconer.

In July, Falconer published a series of proposals for WTO members which suggested that the United States reduce its agricultural subsidies to between 12.8 to 16.2 billion dollars (9.2 to 11.6 billion euros). [More]

Labels: international, policy, politics, trade

Labels: blog, media

Labels: fun

Only hours before the U.S. rate cut announcement, the Canadian forest industry, burned by the double whammy of the surging loonie plus the housing recession in its largest export market, also appealed to the Bank of Canada to act to moderate the loonie's surge.

Further, it asked the federal government for, among other things, more tax relief, including the extension of a two-year tax break on new investments in machinery and equipment to help it compete.

The federal government and Bank of Canada must act now to mitigate the damage that the rapid appreciation of the dollar is doing to Canada's manufacturing sector, the Forest Products Association of Canada appealed in a news release.

"The dollar ... is up over 10 per cent from the 88-cent level it was at the start of 2007 and more than 53 per cent from the 63-cent range it was at five years ago this month," said association president Avrim Lazar.

"This has placed enormous pressure on Canada's forest-products industry and Canada's manufacturing sector more broadly." he said, noting that since 2002, 110,000 jobs having been lost in Canada's manufacturing sector, including 32,000 jobs in the forest sector. [More]

Perversely, the rising price of lumber won't be much help to our struggling housing sector, raising home construction costs just when they need to trim prices to reach now-unqualified buyers. The slump in housing could continue for a significant period, I think as the dame factors that made the boom unwind.

No more. With U.S. home building in the dumps, Romero is working sporadically and sending little money. Diaz and her three young boys are eating rice and beans. She is watching every centavo.

So are economists who track this crucial southward flow of currency. They are worried by what they see.

Remittances are the financial lifeblood for millions of Mexican families and a crucial source of foreign exchange for their government. The $23 billion that maids, cooks, gardeners and others sent home last year — almost all from the U.S. — topped the amount that multinationals invested in Mexico. But fallout from the U.S. construction industry, which employs 1 in 5 Latino immigrants, is now rippling south of the border. Growth in remittances to Mexico has slowed to a trickle.

After increasing an average of just over 23% a year since 2000, remittances for the first two months of 2007 were just 5.5% ahead of the same period last year, according to Mexico's central bank. The figure peaked in May at $2.3 billion and has drifted downward ever since.

Analysts say tougher border enforcement and workplace crackdowns by U.S. immigration authorities may be playing a role. Still, the remittance slowdown has moved virtually in lock step with the stumble in U.S. home building. Housing starts hit their 2006 peak in May before tumbling 50% by year-end. [More]

While this may relieve many who are concerned about illegal immigration, it could be relatively good news for agriculture, which has been struggling to compete for jobs. Harvesting crops is widely perceived as the least desirable of the difficult jobs immigrants typically do ( although having hung drywall, I would debate that).

Still as the economy sputters due to the housing slowdown the transition for workers will only make life for the working poor more uncertain. Obviously the Fed is concerned, and their action yesterday to try to prevent further damage to credit markets and economic growth indicates to me they anticipate a deeper effect than many.

The tendrils of interaction in our economy can often be hidden until they unravel. Over the next months I think we will be surprised by other daisy-chained consequences of what was essentially bad mortgage lending practices.

Labels: economy, immigration, trade

Labels: fun