The Cost of Forward Contracting in Mississippi River Barge Freight and CIF NOLA Markets

Grain elevators often use paper markets to mitigate the risk of (or hedge) their cash grain positions, as well as establish a profit margin through basis trading. Typically, merchandisers use futures or forward contracts to perform these transactions. However, in order to liquidate a cash grain position, grain transportation must be arranged in order to deliver the grain to the buyer. For elevators located along the Mississippi River system selling to Gulf export elevators in New Orleans, that mode of grain transportation is most likely river barge. Contracts for barges are bought and sold by grain merchants either directly with barge lines or through private brokers, and barge contract freight rates fluctuate daily based on supply and demand. Many elevators attempt to mitigate barge freight price risk by forward contracting barges. Unlike typical forward contracts, however, these barge contracts are for the purchase of a service, grain transportation, rather than a commodity such as the grain itself. The question that this study seeks to answer is whether a systematic pricing bias exists in this market that creates a forward contracting cost to either party (buyers or sellers). Results show that a cost of forward contracting barge freight exists at three months out, but the magnitude and the party incurring the cost varies by season. An additional important price discovery and risk management “paper market” also exists in the form of CIF NOLA (cost of insurance and freight, to port of New Orleans) basis bids, traded through brokers. These bids function similar to traditional forward contracts, however, like a futures market, firms can offset their forward contractual obligations by offsetting positions in a liquid off-exchange paper market. Analysis shows that this liquidity, coupled with a good institutional balance of long and short market participants mostly removes the pricing bias commonly found in forward contracting in corn and soybeans, although a small risk premium still exists in wheat and especially sorghum

Destins de femmes: French Women Writers, 1750-1850

Destins de femmes is the first comprehensive overview of French women writers during the turbulent period of 1750-1850. John Isbell provides an essential collection that illuminates the impact women writers had on French literature and politics during a time marked by three revolutions, the influx of Romantic art, and rapid technological change. Each of the book’s thirty chapters introduces a prominent work by a different female author writing in French during the period, from Germaine de Staël to George Sand, from the admired salon libertine Marie du Deffand to Flora Tristan, tireless campaigner for socialism and women’s rights. Isbell draws from multi-genre writers working in prose, poetry and correspondence and addresses the breadth of women’s contribution to the literature of the age. Isbell also details the important events which shaped the writers’ lives and contextualises their work amidst the liberties both given and taken away from women during the period. This anthology fills a significant gap in the secondary literature on this transformative century, which often overlooks women who were working and active. It invites a further gendered investigation of the impact of revolution and Romanticism on the content and nature of French women’s writing, and will therefore be appropriate for both general readers, students, and academics analysing history and literature through a feminist lens

An Outline of Romanticism in the West

Navigating the landscape of Romantic literature and art across Europe and the Americas, An Outline of Romanticism in the West invites readers to embark upon a literary journey. Showcasing a breadth of theoretical and contextual approaches to the study of Romanticism, John Isbell provides an insightful contemporary overview of the field, paired with wide-ranging comparative reflections on the art and literature that helped shape it. Discussing seminal Romantic texts such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Germaine de Staël’s Corinne ou l’Italie, Isbell provides a foundation through which to investigate core concepts, such as the continuum of Romance, the Romantic hero, and Romantic literature’s characteristic repudiation of its own Romanticism. Unusually for a single-author monograph, the book includes both published and unpublished material covering Romantic creation across Europe and the two Americas. Identifying Romanticism as an international movement, Isbell seeks to emphasise a theme frequently ignored by many academics: the roots of Romanticism, and its variations, as a national art. His arguments are supported by extensive interrogations of the political and historical contexts that moulded the outlooks of the writers and artists central to the period. An Outline of Romanticism in the West underlines the interplay between nationalism, history, and artistic inspiration, and will therefore be of value to students and scholars of literature and history, as well as to general readers with an interest in Romanticism in the West

An Outline of Romanticism in the West

Navigating the landscape of Romantic literature and art across Europe and the Americas, An Outline of Romanticism in the West invites readers to embark upon a literary journey. Showcasing a breadth of theoretical and contextual approaches to the study of Romanticism, John Isbell provides an insightful contemporary overview of the field, paired with wide-ranging comparative reflections on the art and literature that helped shape it. Discussing seminal Romantic texts such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Germaine de Staël’s Corinne ou l’Italie, Isbell provides a foundation through which to investigate core concepts, such as the continuum of Romance, the Romantic hero, and Romantic literature’s characteristic repudiation of its own Romanticism. Unusually for a single-author monograph, the book includes both published and unpublished material covering Romantic creation across Europe and the two Americas. Identifying Romanticism as an international movement, Isbell seeks to emphasise a theme frequently ignored by many academics: the roots of Romanticism, and its variations, as a national art. His arguments are supported by extensive interrogations of the political and historical contexts that moulded the outlooks of the writers and artists central to the period. An Outline of Romanticism in the West underlines the interplay between nationalism, history, and artistic inspiration, and will therefore be of value to students and scholars of literature and history, as well as to general readers with an interest in Romanticism in the West

Some Properties of Compactifications

A compactification of a topological space X is a compact (Hausdorff) space containing a dense subspace homeomorphic with X. Since only completely regular spaces have compactifications, all spaces mentioned here will be completely regular unless the contrary is assumed explicitly. This paper is a study of properties of the sets of points which may be added to a space in compactifying it

Averages of Continuous Functions on Countable Spaces

Let X = {x1, x2, ...} be a countably infinite topological space; then the space C*(X) of all bounded real-valued continuous functions f may be regarded as a space of sequences (f(x1), f(x2), ...). It is well known [7, p. 54] that no regular (Toeplitz) matrix can sum all bounded sequences. On the other hand, if (x1, x2, ...) converges in X (to xm), then every regular matrix sums all f in C*(X) (to f(xm)). The main result of this paper is that if a regular matrix sums all f in C*(X) then it sums f to Σαnf(xn), for some absolutely convergent series Σαn. We use this to show that no regular matrix can sum all of C*(X) if X is extremally disconnected (the closure of every open set is open). This extends a theorem of W. Rudin [6], which has an equivalent hypothesis (X is embeddable in the Stone-Cech compactification βN of a discrete space) and concludes that not all f in C*(X) are Cesàro summable. For any continuous linear functional φ on C*(X) one has a ( Riesz ) representation φ(f) = ∫fdμ, where μ is a Radon measure on βX. Our main result is just that X supports μ; μ is forced to be atomic since X is countable. We show further that X has a subset T, the set of heavy points, such that the functionals we are concerned with correspond exactly to measures μ supported by T with μ(T) = 1. Our knowledge of T is limited; it will be summarized elsewhere

Local Connectedness in the Stone-Cech Compactification

This is a study of when and where the Stone-Čech compactification of a completely regular space may be locally connected. As to when, Banaschewski [1] has given strong necessary conditions for βX to be locally connected, and Wallace [19] has given necessary and sufficient conditions in case X is normal. We show below that Banaschewski\u27s necessary conditions are also sufficient and may be restated as follows: βX is locally connected if and only if X is locally connected and pseudo-compact (Corollary 2.5). Moreover, the requirement that βX be locally connected is so strong that it implies that every completely regular space containing X as a dense subspace is locally connected (Corollary 2.6)

On the Continuity of the Real Roots of an Algebraic Equation

It is well known that the root of an algebraic equation is a continuous multiple-valued function of its coefficients [5, p. 3]. However, it is not necessarily true that a root can be given by a continuous single-valued function. A complete solution of this problem has long been known in the case where the coefficients are themselves polynomials in a complex variable [3, chap. V]. For most purposes the concept of the Riemann surface enables one to bypass the problem. However, in the study of the ideal structure of rings of continuous functions, the general problem must be met directly. This paper is confined to an investigation of the continuity of the real roots of an algebraic equation; the results obtained are used to establish a theorem stated, but not correctly proved, by Hewitt [2, Theorem 42] on rings of real-valued continuous functions