COTTON PRICES SEEN STABLE: The recent World Trade Organization panel ruling that found the majority of U.S. cotton subsidies broke global rules should not have a major impact in cotton trading, said Joe O’Neill, senior vice president at the New York Board of Trade, a major commodities exchange.
“I don’t think it’s going to have a traumatic effect on our trading at the exchange in cotton because right now we’re trading world price,” he said in an interview at a recent business summit in Burgenstock, Switzerland.
O’Neill, who was president and chief executive officer of the New York Cotton Exchange from 1984 through 1998, said some of the countries complaining against the U.S. reckon that if the U.S. produced less it would increase the price and felt the subsidies depressed prices. But he suggested that logic was flawed.
“I don’t see there’s going to be much of a change in total production,” he said. “The supply and demand that existed at the time will decide what the price is.”