As a rule, women are more pessimistic than men. The pattern has been among the most consistent across years of tracking U.S. consumer sentiment in the Reuters/University of Michigan survey. Since the survey began tracking gender differences in outlook in January 1978, women have shown a higher sentiment reading just twice.

Things changed this month.

The long-term trend continued in May as overall consumer sentiment dropped to a 28-year low. Yet the mood among women improved slightly whereas sentiment for men soured for a fourth consecutive month, dropping to the lowest since 1980 (second graphic above). Moods darkened for men by the biggest margin in nearly three years, since the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

What's behind it? One factor at play is a diverging view of personal financial situations. Women in the survey indicated their situations improved modestly this month from April, albeit from a 27-year low. For men, however, May marked the seventh straight month of worsening finances. In fact, men rated their finances in the worst shape since the survey began tracking the differences between the genders.

 ”Rain makes grain” is the old saying on LaSalle Street. But rains are the last thing struggling farmers need right now as they try to get their corn and soybean acreage planted in the U.S. Corn Belt from Nebraska through Ohio, Minnesota through Missouri. Tornadoes, thunderstorms, hail and flash floods continued to rake the region over the 3-day Memorial Day weekend. So weather and planting progress will remain front of mind in the coming week.
    Temperatures have also been well below normal this spring, hampering emergence of corn. At this rate, it will take a long warm dry spell to get the Midwestern corn crop “knee high by the Fourth of July” in many parts of the belt. That will have implications for yields especially if weather during pollination in July and August turns hot and dry.
    The wet spring has generally kept corn and soybean planting one to two weeks behind normal. But over the past week the attention of traders seemed to turn more toward the cool temperatures that have slowed emergence.  
     A turn to warmer weather in the Midwest last week was viewed as bearish, traders said, since it promoted better emergence. Weekend temperatures in the Midwest also warmed up.
    USDA will issue its next weekly crop progress on Tuesday afternoon, the day after the U.S. Memorial Day market closure on Monday.
    On Friday, traders said they expect the government to report U.S. corn planting at 85 to 90 percent complete, compared to the five-year average near 95 percent. Soybean planting should be about half way done, versus the seasonal average near 77 percent.
    Aside from Corn Belt weather, the usual outside market drivers for speculators — crude oil prices and the dollar — can be expected to factor into fund buying or profit-taking in grains this week. The conflict between Argentine farmers and the government there will also continue to spur some buying and selling.
    The Argentine situation is keeping the soy markets nervous. One day it appears the two groups will resolve their differences over a soy export tax; the next day they are at odds. Argentina is a top soybean exporter in the height of its shipping season; it is also the world’s largest exporter of soymeal.
    CBOT pit traders said the ups and downs of the Argentine negotiations has raised the volatility in the CBOT July/November soybean spread. That old crop/new crop spread moved from an inversion to a normal carry on Wednesday as the outlook for an Argentine agreement appeared close, then back to a slight inverse on Thursday that jumped back up to a 14-1/2 cent inverse by Friday as the Argentine export outlook stayed uncertain.
     But when the spread turned to carry on Wednesday, traders said, many grain merchandisers took the opportunity to roll their spot basis bids to the CBOT November contract from the more volatile old-crop July. 
     A final trading situation to spotlight: traders noted some concerns about June $6 corn options being exercised over the weekend after July futures settled at $5.99-3/4 a bushel on Friday, which was the last trading day for June options. Since traders basically “pinned” the strike, firms could decide to exercise June $6 options into July futures.  
    That could add a little extra volatility to prices on Monday night or Tuesday morning. But the first session after the markets open after a long holiday weekend is usually a little more active anyway. 

T. Boone Pickens told broadcaster CNBC he expected crude oil prices to keeping going up. "I think we'll get to $150 this year," he said. Analysts at Birinyi Associates, Inc. today put his projections over the past two years against the movement in the price of oil. They concluded the oil investor's views shouldn't be ignored.

1 Was surprised oil went down this much (19 month low) still thinks oil will average $70 in 2007
2 Could exceed $70 in 2007
3 Oil will reach $75 before $55
4 Oil will likely reach $78 this year
5 Says $4.50 gasoline will be possible this summer
6 Oil will average $70 for rest of 2007
7 "No way you can be short oil"
8 Oil may surpass $100 on a geopolitical event and will rise to $80 within 6 months
9 $80 oil could push US into recession
1 0 Oil to retreat before hitting $100
1 1 Oil to hit $100 within a year
1 2 Oil to hit $100 within 6 months
1 3 $100 oil will be routine
1 4 Oil to decline by $10 to $15 in 2nd quarter, which would be to $83
1 5 Oil to stay above $100 in 2nd quarter
1 6 Reversed bet on oil and thinks it will now rise. Covered his short and is now long
1 7 Thinks oil wil rise to $150 by end of 2008
1 8 Thinks oil will go to $150 in 2008

-- Graphic courtesy of Birinyi Associates, Inc.

“Weather trumps everything else this time of year,” said grain analyst Vic Lespinasse after the Chicago Board of Trade markets closed Friday afternoon.
    Especially this spring. Planting is behind. Corn and soybean emergence is behind. Winter wheat is slow to head which will mean a late harvest — all because of an unseasonably cool, wet spring in the heart of the U.S. crop belt.
    The good news this week was the western Midwest was able to shake out of the pattern. Surely farmers took advantage of the break, spending long hours behind the wheel of a tractor.
    But farmers east of the Mississippi River were not as lucky. The eastern Midwest picked up more rains and it was cool.
    USDA will tell the world Monday afternoon farmers’ planting progress.
    The general consensus among Chicago grain traders late Friday was for USDA to report corn planting near 75 percent done vs. the seasonal average of 90 percent and soybean seeding 25 percent complete, below the usual pace of 54 percent.
    It’s especially important this spring and summer that the weather cooperates so U.S. farmers produce a bin-busting crop given the global demand for food and spiraling inflation.
    “The focus of the trade is turning from the rain to the temperatures as the coolness is impacting emergence,” one CBOT floor broker said.
    There’s also some concern that if the slow pace of wheat development continues due to cool temperatures, it will limit the number of double-cropped soybean acres planted after the southern Midwest wheat harvest.
    The soft red winter wheat crop is coming along strong but in the top SRW states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri only 16 percent of the crop had headed as of last week, below 43 percent a year ago.

Photo: Soft red winter wheat field near Hopkinsville, Kentucky, taken the second week of May.

A recent trip to bicyle-peppered cities Copenhagen and Amsterdam got me thinking about the pedal possibilities in U.S. cities. Alas, New York, the country's biggest city, has long way to go make biking easier, and that seems true in many other cities in the world's largest motor fuel consumer.

As gasoline nears $4.00 a gallon throughout the country one might think that U.S. commuters would be jumping on their bikes. Evidently the prices aren't high enough yet.

Here in New York, it's Bike Month and though I live just 7 miles from my office in Times Square, I haven't two-wheeled it in yet, though I did for years. Likely, I won't any time soon because fighting traffic across the avenues isn't appealing anymore.

Granted, NYC has made made biking improvements over the last decade, building and extending bicycle paths on Manhattan's edges and keeping lanes open on most of its bridges, which offer spectacular river views. And New York City has plans to double the number of bike commuters by 2015 and add 200 miles of bike lanes by the end of the decade.

But bike lanes in the bustling parts of the island are probably used as much by darting cabs and other vehicles as much as people who pedal, which can make for a harrowing experience.

Sure, New York City streets will probably always be louder than those in Amsterdam where fenders banging against bike frames can sometimes be the loudest traffic noise one hears, or in Copenhagen, where bike lanes often have their own traffic lights.

But with Mayor Michael Bloomberg's traffic congestion plan defeated and few businesses offering bike parking space, things don't look like they will improve much soon.

Or at least not enough so that New Yorkers will be biking their children around the city in droves like they do in Copenhagen.

What do you think, will New York and other U.S. cities catch up on biking as the price of oil rises?

Pic 1: Kid-moving bicycle in Copenhagen, a common sight. Pic 2: Bicycle parking in Amsterdam. Pic 3: Biking in New York. Photos, Tim Gardner.

Are high gas prices killing Americans' love affair with gas-guzzling SUVs? Looks that way.

In April, SUVs and light trucks took their smallest share of total U.S. vehicle sales in nearly nine years, and dealers sold more new cars than trucks for the second month running -- the first time that's happened since 2001. While many factors have teamed up to torpedo sales of high-ticket vehicles like SUVs -- tighter credit, a tough job market, slumping real estate values and a generally soft economy -- the fact that pump prices have soared to a record aren't helping, as the chart shows.

This trend might not easily reverse in May. Gas prices are up an average of 3 percent in the first two weeks of the month, with the latest weekly average pump price setting a fresh record of $3.72 a gallon, according to the Energy Department's Energy Information Administration.

A study from research and consulting firm Wood Mackenzie found that mergers in the energy industry have generated value, due largely in part to surging oil and gas prices.

In a review of 195 deals by 38 companies between 2001 and 2006, the study found that $204 billion in value was created, with an additional $34 billion of value generated through access to discovered resource opportunities.

"The main element of value creation through M&A deals has been the change in oil and gas prices which has created $327 billion of value," the study said. "Other factors which counter this value creation, include changing expectations on assets, industry-wide cost inflation and tax changes, reduce the value by $123 billion."

More than 80 percent of all of the deals created value, while almost 90 percent of transactions done between 2001 and 2004 showed benefits.

"In the current environment of increasing prices and increasing costs, it has taken on average three years for deals to achieve returns in excess of 15%, with returns generally increasing the longer the asset is held, such deals benefiting from the rise in commodity prices," the study said.

Average returns from North American deals were less than those elsewhere, due in part to competitive pressures, the study found. Europe showed the highest returns, driven by Statoil’s SDFI purchase.

"Looking forward, the benefits to purchasing companies of increasing commodity prices will continue to be adversely affected by higher costs, potentially more aggressive fiscal regimes as well as increasingly competitive prices which need to be paid to acquire the assets," the study said.

Been paying more at the pump lately? Not to worry. It's just a figment of your imagination, new government data shows.

The U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that gasoline prices fell last month by 2 percent. This was the very same month when crude oil prices surged 11.7 percent and there was NO pass through at the pump? Hmmmm.

Meanwhile, another branch of the very same U.S. government, the Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration, contends average retail gas prices actually shot up 9.5 percent in April from March. Whoa!

Why the discrepancy?

It's the magic of so-called "seasonal adjustments" -- a practice employed by economists and other statisticians to smoothe out volatile month-to-month changes and give a supposedly clearer picture of the underlying trend within the numbers.

A look at the non-seasonally adjusted data from the BLS is closer to reflecting reality: It shows gas prices rose 5.6 percent last month.

Better, but that still understates the increase recorded by the EIA by 41 percent. Makes you wonder where the BLS buys its gas.

Is it fair to scapegoat ethanol and biodiesel for record grain prices and the knock-on surge in food prices? It’s a key question for policy makers as the pressure builds to wriggle out of U.S. rules to blend 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels into the nation’s gasoline supply by 2022.

There are a slew of reasons for high food prices. China requires more calories and Chinese are eating more meat. The weak dollar, weather disruptions, government intervention and speculation in commodities have been a perfect storm for food inflation. (Food price spikes are tracked in Food and Argiculture Organization graphic on the left).

Last week a top official at the International Monetary Fund, John Lipsky, said that increased demand for biofuels accounts for 70 percent of the increase in corn prices and 40 percent of the increase in soybean prices. Still he noted that oil prices would have been higher in the absence of biofuels. Francisco Blanch a commodities researcher at Merrill Lynch told Business Week that oil prices could be at least 15 percent higher without ethanol.

U.S. farmers planted the largest corn crop since WWII last year. The 25 percent of the U.S. corn crop that goes into ethanol production is not available for food products like cooking oil, corn sweetener and tortillas. Almost half of the corn crop goes to feed livestock. But making ethanol from corn also yields a byproduct called distillers dried grain, which is used as concentrated animal feed.

A blacklash against the ethanol blacklash is building. The Renewable Fuels Association is battling negative perceptions with data it says shows rising energy costs have twice the impact of increased corn costs on food inflation. Brazil is also alarmed at the criticism since it produces almost as much ethanol as the United States from its abundant sugar cane and is eager to increase its exports. Ethanol is a crucial part of the energy mix in Brazil and is distilled and distributed to pumping stations far more efficiently and with a much greener footprint than in the United States. Brazil can vastly expand cane production without competing with food acres.

One has to wonder whether it makes sense for the United States to reduce or eliminate the U.S. 54 cent per gallon ethanol import tariff to help it meet renewable fuel targets with less impact on food and animal feed prices. Of course that would be a tough sell to American corn farmers.

For the first time this spring I saw farmers doing field work in northern Illinois, not far from the Wisconsin border as I was coming home from work Friday night. They are easily two to three weeks behind normal as the Midwest just can’t seem to shake this cold, wet weather pattern. Saturday was cool but clear. Rains returned on Sunday. Forecasters are calling for more rain this week but the amounts look to be lighter than previously thought. 

Northern Illinois farmers are not the only ones behind due extremely wet field conditions. Crop scouts traveling May 8-10 through central and southern Illinois as well eastern and central Iowa — the top two U.S. corn and soy states — saw standing pools of water in fields that would normally be planted to corn by now.
    
The initial concern is a yield drag of roughly 1.5 bushels per acre per day everyday a corn field is planted after May 15. But one has to wonder now if a lot of those fields will be switched to soybeans.

So far, U.S. corn planting is off to its slowest start since 1999. Worries about a smaller 2008 crop than currently forecast at 12.1 billion bushels is helping to fuel Chicago Board of Trade grain prices. Last week, CBOT corn hit a record high of $6.79 per bushel, notched in the July 2009 contract — two to three times the typical price for corn.
    
The U.S. Department of Agriculture will issue its weekly crop progress report on Monday afternoon. Chicago traders are estimating that only about half the crop is seeded, compared to the seasonal average of 77 percent by mid-May. Farmers are taking advantage of every break in the rain to plant.
    
    Photo taken May 10 near Salem, Illinois, about 260 miles south of Chicago.