Yesterday in Mt Vernon, Iowa. Not to see a politician, but to visit a friend who has just moved into a huge, new facility selling John Deere farm equipment. No mining for miles around, but some of the same issues bedevil the dealership.
The cost of farm equipment has risen in some instances by almost twenty-five percent in the last year. There is a ten to twenty month waiting period for delivery of new tractors. At least that was until the crash or stock market decline.
Now the bad news is that corn is down from almost six dollars to less than three dollars a unit. The good news is that metal prices have tumbled. Which way this will go, is utterly unpredictable. The relief is that fewer tractors will be sold, and that will give time to catch up on the order’s backlog. Why worry about selling if credit is hard to get from any but the local bank that your father owns?
House prices in Washington County, some fifty miles south of Mt Vernon, barely rose over the past years, and have barely fallen as the rest of the country held its breath. The local folk are tired of politicians and fixed in their voting intentions. Those I spoke to could not understand how anybody can still be “undecided” saying to the effect that if you have not already decided you have either not paid attention or you have a vanilla brain.
Thus there are corners, but only tiny corners of the country not totally rocked by recent events. But even they are holding their breath to see which way commodity prices and interest rates will go.
