Business & Finance: Corn, Hogs, & Rye

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Chicago finance has its delicacies of shade no less fine than those of Manhattan's stock market. Example: last week's "corn & hog parity" got alarmingly out of line. Dollar a bushel corn equals $10 per cwt. hogs or something is wrong in the stock yards. Corn for May delivery passed $1.03¼ a bushel whereas hogs "at Chicago" sold from $6.65 per cwt. undressed. Foreign corn demand has made golden maize too dear for U. S. pigs to eat & grow fat. The pigs must die lean & cheap. Overproduction of litters, weaned on high priced feed, plus the abnormal foreign demand for corn explains the current departure from the inexorable "parity." Farmers must win back on corn what they lose on swine. Furthermore, the situation in rye (unexplained except for unrivaled Eastern demand), is unusually bullish; U. S. rye supplies are now lower than they have been for five years.