"When you see the government speculating in markets, you have to ask yourself if the game is rigged?"

I frequently dislike the outcome of these reports and try to balance emotion over logic, maybe SC has called this right because most of the time when I am dissappointed in the results, I am on the wrong side of the market. I have painfully learned that complaining about the reports doesn't do any good, the market seems to accept these reports as fact and the rest really doesn't matter.

The question I find myself asking now is this, why is USDA in the business of "guessing" our crop size? There are private firms that seem to do the same thing and their results seem to become public knowledge at no known cost to me as a taxpayer. I seem to recall that their statistics fall within acceptable limits of what the all seeing USDA usually reports. Why not bring some cash back into the ag budget by ending the reporting service?

Finally, while it is probably just as true today it may not be as obvious as it once was. Back in the day, the Gov't. owned huge stores of grain thru the grain reserve program and controlled the reporting service. Any private firm with this much conflict of interest would have been brought up on charges. I'm pretty sure that the market was never manipulated with the interest of the presiding administration................................