A great deal of grist to review this morning, but we will keep it short, since Mondays will fade as Ure slides into more time off this fall. Here’s a preliminary work plan:
- Orientation
- Market preview
- BlinkLabNews
- Fed Box
- At the Ranch:
- Back to school
- Handwriting and aging note
The Morning Sight
Dow futures – when I looked earlier – were down less than 100 points. Call it down two-tenths of one percent. But the broader market is wading into “suckish and bearish”. We were at the 85-day moving average Friday, so an excursion below could be the rock (or reef) that sinks the financial ship.
Brent crude was over $107 and West Texas intermediate was over $102 (again, these will change.) But the impacts of the Iranian/Houthi attacks this weekend are shaking futures. And if you push a diesel around, start option planning. Triple A calls the price $6.2301 nationally against year-ago $3.6923 – a 68.73 percent hike in a year. THAT is the inflation coming for America (and our trading partners).
The big “food stocks” planner will be Thursday with the NOAA Climate Prediction Center update of its multi-month outlooks. After that, USDA crop reports will give insight. Not into whether there will be crops—of course there will be—but into how much, where, and at what delivered cost.
The “Time to Diet?” Sidebar
Color us “highly skeptical” of predictions about Ukraine wheat exports. Why?
The USDA’s brand-new September 11 estimate puts the 2026/27 crop at 26.0 million metric tons, versus roughly 23.5 million tons last year. That is an increase of about 2.5 million tons, or 10.6%. The harvest has apparently come in considerably better than the 22–23 million-ton estimates being used earlier this summer. (Ure shakes his head in disbelief.)
But here’s where USDA partially redeems itself: they also cut expected Ukrainian wheat exports from 13.5 million to 12.5 million tons, mainly because of Black Sea/logistics disruptions. That compares with roughly 14 million tons in 2025/26, so actual export availability is running about 1.5 million tons, or 11%, lower year-over-year.
The global share? Ukraine exports: 12.5 million tons out of global wheat trade of about 211.8 million = roughly 5.9% of internationally traded wheat. This is something of a bookkeeping IED, but here’s what matters – for now:
Canada, Australia, Argentina, the EU, the U.S., Kazakhstan and others can substitute some volume. In fact, USDA’s August revisions illustrated exactly this: Russia/Ukraine export forecasts were cut by a combined 2.5 million tons, while projected world trade dropped only about 0.34 million tons, because other exporters picked up much of the slack. But that’s before a possible Fed rate hike, expansion of either war, and more pipelines for diesel going “poof!”
News Compressor: ON
As my retirement plans phase in, these Monday reports will be replaced by something very short; a compressed version of the world.
The useful news isn’t the number of headlines. It’s that several previously separate stories are beginning to connect. This is expected in what we call a “ridgeline” for word-frequency clusters in OSINT news flow from media sites and RSS feeds.
The Gulf remains the lead. Attacks have shut Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, an important bypass around Hormuz, while Hormuz traffic itself remains badly impaired. Add pressure around Bab el-Mandeb and the problem isn’t simply expensive oil anymore. It’s disappearing redundancy. One route gets pinched, you use another. When the main route, the bypass and the other end of the Red Sea all become questionable, insurance, freight and inventories begin doing the pricing.
Markets are starting to notice. Brent moved above $108, the dollar strengthened, bond yields rose and markets are heavily leaning toward a quarter-point Fed hike this week. That’s the chain we’ve been watching:
Energy > inflation > bonds > currencies > central banks.
When oil moves an oil trader’s book, it’s an oil story. When oil starts changing the price of money, wheat farming or other commodities, we’ve moved into something bigger. Do I need to say uglier?
Ukraine supplied another interesting turn. Trump has reportedly urged Zelenskiy to ease attacks on Russian diesel infrastructure because reduced Russian refining capacity is adding to the global diesel squeeze. (And could ripple to Russia wheat, in our thinking…) Destroying an enemy’s fuel system makes perfect military sense—until the economic consequences circle the globe and begin hurting your own side. That’s systems warfare escaping the battlefield.
Diesel at the pump remains the number I’d watch rather than becoming hypnotized by Brent. Trucks, tractors, ships, mines and construction equipment don’t run on economic theory. Expensive diesel works its way into almost everything that has weight and needs to move.
Safety warnings from prominent AI figures have begun migrating from academic discussion into markets, regulation and capital allocation. Meanwhile the physical AI story continues marching through chips, memory, electricity, grid capacity, cooling and security. A tipping point (lower) is increasingly possible.
Europe isn’t escaping any of this. ECB officials are already talking about additional tightening if energy inflation spreads into wages and other prices. Qatar looking for multi-year U.S. LNG supplies extending into 2031 is another clue that serious players aren’t necessarily planning around a two-week Gulf inconvenience. Our “water shortages, regional, desalination attacks” concern remains on the table for fall-into-hell (also known as 2027).
On the domestic disaster desk, Northeast flooding produced rescues and transportation trouble, while Hawaii continues cleaning up from Hurricane Lowell. On the Big Island, reader Hank is no doubt eyeing hurricane Norbert and tropical depression Fifteen-E. Skeptic of ENSO impacts?
The individual headlines will juke around all week. What matters is whether those chains continue tightening. Right now, they are.
We’re spitballing Monday odds of another material Gulf shipping, energy or security escalation this week at 91%. Odds of a quarter-point Fed hike: nearing 90%.
The ridgeline in our forward data views ought to be in full swing by Friday with more the following week. I’ll skip the “seat backs and tray-tables” discussion.
At the Ranch: Handwriting on the Wall
Why is George going back to school?
- Because even at almost 78, I still need to “feed the brain” maybe?
- Because neural plasticity is a “real thing“?
- Or, because I plan to soon have too much free time on my hands?
Answer Key: All wrong
The real answer is its use in schools where you can get the most out of a modeling product called NetLogo with the least effort. It’s an alternative to spreadsheets and drowning in AI-generated Python models.
NetLogo is a free programming environment for building agent-based models—computer simulations in which large numbers of individual “agents” follow relatively simple rules and, through their interactions, produce complex system behavior.
Agents might represent people, investors, businesses, animals, vehicles, viruses, or even bits of information; they operate within a simulated environment and can respond to one another and to changing conditions.
Developed originally at Northwestern University, NetLogo is widely used in economics, social science, biology, ecology, education, and complexity research because it lets researchers ask a powerful question: if individuals behave according to these rules, what larger patterns emerge over time?
The specific reason for school? Two actually – the first – given the OTH software project – is a kind of “natural.” Pipe the OTH outputs (parsed) into NetLogo and suddenly you have a second and third-order tool to run as a check against AI’s onboard reasoning. The second reason?
Handwriting Repair
I figure my making notes (the old-fashioned way – by hand) I will be setting up a long-term, medically useful self-check tool. Yes, handwriting shifts with age. What is not a red flag?
- Preferring a pen to a keyboard.
- Messy notes. You were probably messy at 30. Um…well…er…
- Printing instead of cursive. Schools stopped teaching it. Printing is faster for ham radio-Morse use.
- A signature that looks “old-fashioned.” Style does not equal pathology.
A one-off ugly page after a long day is probably nothing medical, though. Handwriting is a skilled motor task. Age can degrade the skill. Using the skill is not the diagnosis.
Side Benefit?
It’s a chance to “click with meaning.” I am on a one-man search for the perfect writing instrument. A bunch of new candidates will land this week. But up until now, the OHTO Fude 1.5 rollerballs have been best of class.
My first trial will be of the Uni-Ball Signo Broad Point Gel – which gets good reviews, but we shall see. My writing is already messier than most doctors and I need to tune that up.
Back to being a wild-intelligence condensed into an animal body for another day…
Write when you get agile,
George@Ure.net