Quick Overview

Stock-index futures staged a bullish reversal Tuesday, thanks to tamer-than-expected minutes from the Federal Reserve's last policymaking session.

Gold output falls to 73-year low www.Iafrica.com reported today that South Africa's 2004 gold production was the lowest since 1931.


The International Energy Agency reduced its estimate of 2005 world oil demand by 50,000 barrels to 84.3 million barrels per day.


AgRural said it forecasts the Brazilian soybean crop at 51.3 million
metric tons, down from its previous estimate of 52.3 million tons, due to
excessive rain in the main soybean-producing state of Mato Grosso. The U.S.
Department of Agriculture has the crop currently figured at 54 million tons.

The U.S. trade deficit grew more than expected in February to a record $61.0 billion, as the U.S. economy sucked in record imports and exports remained high but showed little new growth, the government said on Tuesday. The trade deficit with China actually narrowed in February to $13.9 billion from $15.3 billion in January.

Canada's exports increased 1.4% in February to C$36.5 billion while imports were down .2% to C$31.7 billion. The result was a trade surplus of C$4.8 billion.

According to International Monetary Fund the world economy will expand 4.3 percent this year as stronger-than-expected growth in the United States, China and elsewhere balances weakness in Europe and Japan.

USDA Secretary Johanns said that he wants the beef trade with Japan to resume by July. That’s nice, but what does Japan think?


Thirty-three U.S. governors are seeking to expand federal mandates for the use of ethanol as a fuel additive, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

Chinese officials are visiting Brazil this week in search of knowledge on how to introduce ethanol as an additive into gasoline fuel.


Retail sales in the U.K. were up 1.8% YoY .

The United States should deploy widespread wired and wireless
gigabit networks as a national priority, according to a white paper
from the IEEE-USA
Committee on Communications and Information
Policy (CCIP). "Providing Ubiquitous Gigabit Networks in the United
States," issued 14 March, says that our nation must act promptly to
ensure that a new...


Hang in there! Time may indeed be on your side. If you can just last another quarter century. By then, people will start lives that could last 1,000 years or more..


The USDA attaché increased the estimate of China's sugar imports from 1.2 million to 1.4 million metric tons. The estimate of sugarcane and beet acreage in China was increased by 6% for the upcoming year.


For 16 years, the FDA resisted pressure to approve aspartame due to safety studies linking the artificial sweetener to numerous adverse reactions, including the development of brain tumors in animal studies. In 1977, FDA investigator Jerome Bressler released a report describing how, in clinical studies submitted to the FDA, Searle removed aspartame-induced brain tumors that developed in lab rats and placed them back into the study. If the rats died, Bressler reported, Searle would resurrect them on paper.