Fama Analysis on USDA The Nobel prize just won by Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Shiller has an important relationship to the current lack of USDA reporting due to the partial government shutdown. Under Fama's efficient markets theory, financial markets are essentially information markets. In that vein, commodity markets have been somewhat unique relative to equities and bonds in that USDA's reports are perceived as more definitive about supply and demand than the frequent parsing of Census, Treasury, Fed or Labor reports. Because agricultural commodities are seasonal and this is a hiatus period in global crop production, there are worse times than now for USDA to be absent from the market. Nonetheless, one would expect incr...

TAGS – Asia, North America