While long forgotten by most outside of the financial world, today is the anniversary of a record-setting event. It was on this date 33 years ago that we experienced Black Monday in the stock market. That day in 1987 that the Dow Jones lost over 22%, literally a loss heard round the world. That break dwarfed the previous Black Monday, which had occurred on the 28th of October of 1929, where we lost a paltry 13%. Granted, we have all sorts of circuit breakers and other mechanisms now in place to arrest such a wild swing, but to keep all of this in perspective, if the Dow Industrials were to lose 22% today, it would equate to around 6,300 points. Now that would be noteworthy. By the way, we are up 150 points this morning and trading around 1000 points below the record high.
The biggest economic news around this morning comes from China as they have released third-quarter GDP numbers and show growth of 4.9%. While not quite up to an expected 5.2% figure, it was still an improvement over the 3.2% in the second quarter and would seem to suggest they are on a recovery path from the pandemic. It is interesting to note that they imported more goods during the month of September than in any month on record. While we know that part of these imports were attributed to ag products, still heavily weighted to Brazil, they have also been importing crude oil to the tune of 11.12 million barrels a day with total imports up 12.7% year to date. Obviously, they knew a bargain when they see one and reportedly went on a buying frenzy when prices crashed earlier this year. It was also reported that the pork output in that nation expanded by 18% during the quarter, which is the first quarterly expansion since AFS devastated their hog herd. They have a long way to go after losing somewhere between 50 and 60% of the herd but appear to be headed in the right direction.
China did not show up in the export market this morning, but we did see a couple of good sales nevertheless. Mexico purchased 123,000 MT of corn, and another 345,000 was sold to unknown destinations.
USDA reports should be back on schedule this week with crop progress updates to be issued this afternoon. The trade is expecting bean harvest to be close to 80% complete and corn between 50 and 55%.
In the macros, we find energies and metals higher, financials under pressure, equities higher, and the dollar under pressure.
