Thursday wasn’t a good day for equities, but commodity futures recovered somewhat from steep falls yesterday. Number 2 cotton futures rose 3.26 percent to 83.55 cents per pound at 2:30 p.m. EST.
Much of the increase, reported Bloomberg News, was driven by a Department of Agriculture report that the U.S. will export 15 million bales of cotton in the year that started on August 1. Meanwhile, China is projected to import 12.5 million bales, and global consumption will total 120.9 million bales, 2.7 percent more than last season.
The USDA also said that global and national inventories of cotton would drop to a 15-year low.
“Today’s report was clearly very friendly for prices and the market immediately reacted accordingly,” Mike Stevens, an trader in Mandeville, Louisiana, told Bloomberg. “The U.S. numbers were in line with what the bulls had expected, but world numbers were the icing on their cake.”
On the other side of the globe, devastating monsoon rains and subsequent flooding destroyed as much as 20 percent of Pakistan’s cotton crop, as thousands lost their lives and millions were rendered homeless by the deadly waters.
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