Fact Pack! Lobster Import-Export Weirdness
By Hightower Las Vegas and RCG Economics on October 29, 2024
In a moment, we offer our take on an item revealed in last week’s section on trade data: Maine exports a lot of lobster to Canada and Canada exports a lot of lobster to Maine.
But first…
“Truflation”
Truflation, a new-ish provider of real-time financial data, has launched a new proprietary metric — The Deadlift Index — rooted in research by analyst Pieter Levels (@levelsio on Twitter/X) on CEOs who lift weights vs. those who don’t and how their firms compare on the S&P 500.
The index merges fitness metrics, finance data, and corporate performance, and it appears to have identified a reliable correlation: The companies with CEOs who lift weights—particularly those who deadlift—outperform chief executives who don’t grab steel, squat and grunt.
What’s more, the marketing rollout included a note that the index will soon be “tradable,” so… let the hedging and betting begin! Index trend:
Source: Truflation.com As of 10/28/24
Election Betting
Avid watchers of electoral contests in Nevada and across the nation likely already know that retail investing platform Robinhood debuted a program Monday enabling users to put money on the outcome of the presidential election, entering a growing market which heavily favors former President Donald Trump next month.
For those unaware, Robinhood announced that U.S. citizens will be able to buy “derivative contracts” betting on whether Trump or Harris will prevail, as follows:
- Contracts will be priced between $0.02 and $0.99 at market-implied odds of victory for each candidate, earning a $1 payout if the user correctly chooses the next president.
- Users can purchase a maximum of 5,000 election contracts — topping out at a $5,000 payout if they do so and pick the winner.
Hours of operation for Robinhood’s election betting market will increase as Election Day nears, with trading open until 8 p.m. EDT today and the next few days, and open almost continuously starting Sunday.
Contracts will pay out Jan. 7-8, 2025.
Other Election Betting Sites
Prior to Robinhood’s entry into the space, prediction market companies Polymarket, Kalshi, and PredictIt already offered election betting, a topic that got a shoutout from Trump a few weeks back.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has expressed concern about wagers potentially threatening election integrity by way of voters being incentivized to support a certain candidate due to their bets. (A federal court recently ruled against the CFTC in a case against Kalshi.)
Polymarket is not subject to U.S. courts as it operates offshore and only takes bets from non-U.S. residents. That also means it does not have low limits on individual users. One French national has almost $30 million riding on a Trump victory on the site.
Election Betting Odds had the odds of a Trump win at 62% as of yesterday midday — higher than the poll-based prediction models including FiveThirtyEight’s, which yesterday had Trump down for a a 54% chance at victory, and higher than Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin, which prices Trump at a 52.9% chance of a win.
EV in Nevada
As of first thing Monday morning, roughly 635,000 votes had been reported in Nevada, likely slightly less than half of the 1.3 to 1.4 million who will end up voting — unless there is an unexpected wellspring of enthusiasm for standing in long poll lines on Tuesday.
The Republicans had a turnout edge of 6.1 percent, and their raw vote “firewall” sat at roughly 33,500 votes, or 5.2 percent, according to the Early Vote Blog at The Nevada Independent. For comparison, in 2020. after the first 8 days of early voting, the Democrats led statewide by 54,000 votes.
Nonpartisans are so far averaging a little more than one-quarter of the daily vote (yesterday’s raw number was 160,000+). How those who are true nonpartisans will vote will be part of what helps the winner win — possibly by less than 1 percent, if the Democrats cannot make up ground in their statewide numbers before Election Day.
Home Sales Snapshots
From The Daily Shot:
As of September 2024
As of September 2024
U.S. Ag — Lobster Edition
Last week’s Fact Pack feature on trade, showed the U.S. is heavily reliant on imports for seafood, with an estimated 70–85 percent of seafood consumed domestically coming from international sources.
The lobster and raw seafood data in the U.S. caught our eye, along with raw numbers and percentages for food & beverage imports from Mexico & Canada — which account for 42% of the U.S. total.
Map Source: Trace One analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data as of 2024
As we noted last week, Mexico exported over $44 billion in food products to the U.S. in 2023, primarily beer, while Canada exported $38 billion, with bread and pastries as its leading category.
Canada also sends lobsters to Maine, which we thought was odd, until we learned that Maine has enormous processing plants that do little more than divvy up those deliveries and send Canadian lobster shipments to cities down the eastern seaboard and in the Midwest.
Analysis: Americans like lobster — and lobster handling outfits in Maine like to make money.
We also learned that Much of Maine’s harvested seafood, including its top exports of lobster and salmon, are exported to Canada for processing — and then are shipped back to the U.S. for distribution to other export markets.
Takeaway: Either this is a money-laundering scheme of epic proportions (kidding) or (a) Maine needs help at busier times of year and (b) the U.S. and Canada are nice to each other in lobster (and other) trade deals.
More Maine lobster facts search:
- Maine accounts for 80-85% of total US lobster sales.
- From 2010-2020, Maine fisheries harvested over $6.3 billion of seafood products.
- Lobster accounted for about 79% of this harvest value.
- Lobster is by far Maine’s largest fishery in terms of income, value added, and gross output.
- In 2019, lobster harvesting accounted for over 5,000 jobs in Maine and directly contributed almost $512 million of gross output to the economy.
- The total impacts of lobster harvesting, including indirect and induced impacts, account for over 6,500 jobs and $852 million of gross output throughout the state.
You can read the full study here from last week.
U.S. Treasury Internet Search: $40 Billion 0% Interest Balance Transfer Offers
Americans with moderate to good credit ratings who run up their credit card balances and want to evade paying all the interest often seek relief by transferring balances to new cards issued by banks offering no-interest payments for some number of months.
Too bad the U.S. Treasury can’t do the same with the $34.8 trillion in outstanding debt it was carrying at the end of Q2 2024. Breakdown as of June 30, 2024:
- 33% was held by government funds such as Social Security and the Fed.
- $9.2 trillion, or 26%, was owned by foreign governments, with the most held by Japan and China.
- $4.9 trillion, or 14%, was in the possession of mutual funds.
- $3.1 trillion was held by individuals.
- Banks and pension funds owned $2.2 trillion and $2.0 trillion, respectively.
U.S. federal debt has risen $300 billion over the last 3 weeks and hit a new record of $35.8 trillion. Graph:
As of 6/30/24
GDP Per Capita by State
From the team at Visual Capitalist:
As of 2023
EU Defense
Who spends what on defense in Europe:
As of 2024
On the Horizon
Mike PeQueen: Thursday’s PCE index (the Fed’s favorite inflation gauge) and Friday’s employment report both have the potential to move the market — but the election will probably dominate everything for a couple of weeks.
