Typically, Chinese purchases of American soybeans picks up in the autumn, due to timing of harvests. If this is an important factor in the recovery of US soybean prices, one would expect futures for November delivery of soybeans would reflect that fact. As of today, they don’t.
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One of the key difficulties in measuring effects and attributing causality is the fact that there are typically many confounding factors. That is why social scientists (and financial economists) often resort to event analyses — looking at what happens around a certain event (like an announcement) when little else is happening. Because there is so much going on with the Trump administration, this is not always possible. However, yesterday evening, the White House released a directive to USTR to identify an additional $200 billion worth of taxable Chinese imports. Here is what happened.
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