Campaign’s must convey the impression that the company is formidable both in breadth and in depth and can continue its actions indefinetly, ultimately recieveing huge investor capital from both accredited and speculative investors.

SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones) — Tyson Foods Inc. reported Monday its quarterly profit fell 40% from a year ago, dragged down by wider losses in its beef business and surging grain and fuel costs.

Near record-level costs for corn and soybean meal is taking its toll, and Tyson said it plans to raise costs for its chicken and beef products that account for 78% of its total sales.

“We have no other choice but to raise prices substantially,” CEO Richard Bond said in a conference call. “We are raising prices because we can’t absorb these costs. Despite concerns about the economy, people have to eat, and they will continue to eat protein.”

Tyson boosted its fiscal 2008 grain-cost forecast to more than $500 million, 67% higher than its prior outlook issued in November. Demand for corn-based ethanol used as an alternative for gasoline is hurting Tyson’s profit. It’s a situation the company hasn’t faced before. In the past, higher grain prices were due to supplies and were short-term, Bond explained.

The Springdale, Ark.-based company (TSN) will stop offering financial forecasts, calling the commodity markets too “volatile” to make accurate predictions.

For the quarter ended Dec. 29, Tyson said it earned $34 million, or 10 cents a share, down from $57 million, or 16 cents, in last year’s same period.

Sales rose 3% to $6.8 billion in the fiscal first quarter.

Tyson said higher average selling prices for chicken and beef helped offset lower shipment volumes. Pork sales were lifted by strong exports and Tyson said global demand for chicken and pork is increasing as the standard of living in the developing countries improves.

Meanwhile, the company is facing more beef slaughter capacity than available cattle as well as sluggish demand for U.S. beef overseas. It plans to cease slaughter operations at its Emporia, Kansas, beef plant in the next few weeks, resulting in 1,500 lost jobs.

In its fiscal first quarter, Tyson’s beef unit reported an operating loss of $ 85 million, wider than the loss of $23 million a year ago. The company’s overall gross profit margin fell to 4.5% of sales, from 5.1%, hurt by rising grain costs and lower sales volumes.

Tyson shares rose 3.5% to $13.72 in late morning trading.

FOR as long as most people can remember, food has been getting cheaper and farming has been in decline. In 1974-2005 food prices on world markets fell by three-quarters in real terms. Food today is so cheap that the West is battling gluttony even as it scrapes piles of half-eaten leftovers into the bin.

That is why this year’s price rise has been so extraordinary. Since the spring, wheat prices have doubled and almost every crop under the sun—maize, milk, oilseeds, you name it—is at or near a peak in nominal terms. The Economist’s food-price index is higher today than at any time since it was created in 1845 (see chart). Even in real terms, prices have jumped by 75% since 2005. No doubt farmers will meet higher prices with investment and more production, but dearer food is likely to persist for years (see article). That is because “agflation” is underpinned by long-running changes in diet that accompany the growing wealth of emerging economies—the Chinese consumer who ate 20kg (44lb) of meat in 1985 will scoff over 50kg of the stuff this year. That in turn pushes up demand for grain: it takes 8kg of grain to produce one of beef.

But the rise in prices is also the self-inflicted result of America’s reckless ethanol subsidies. This year biofuels will take a third of America’s (record) maize harvest. That affects food markets directly: fill up an SUV’s fuel tank with ethanol and you have used enough maize to feed a person for a year. And it affects them indirectly, as farmers switch to maize from other crops. The 30m tonnes of extra maize going to ethanol this year amounts to half the fall in the world’s overall grain stocks.

Dearer food has the capacity to do enormous good and enormous harm. It will hurt urban consumers, especially in poor countries, by increasing the price of what is already the most expensive item in their household budgets. It will benefit farmers and agricultural communities by increasing the rewards of their labour; in many poor rural places it will boost the most important source of jobs and economic growth.

Although the cost of food is determined by fundamental patterns of demand and supply, the balance between good and ill also depends in part on governments. If politicians do nothing, or the wrong things, the world faces more misery, especially among the urban poor. If they get policy right, they can help increase the wealth of the poorest nations, aid the rural poor, rescue farming from subsidies and neglect—and minimise the harm to the slum-dwellers and landless labourers. So far, the auguries look gloomy.

In the trough
That, at least, is the lesson of half a century of food policy. Whatever the supposed threat—the lack of food security, rural poverty, environmental stewardship—the world seems to have only one solution: government intervention. Most of the subsidies and trade barriers have come at a huge cost. The trillions of dollars spent supporting farmers in rich countries have led to higher taxes, worse food, intensively farmed monocultures, overproduction and world prices that wreck the lives of poor farmers in the emerging markets. And for what? Despite the help, plenty of Western farmers have been beset by poverty. Increasing productivity means you need fewer farmers, which steadily drives the least efficient off the land. Even a vast subsidy cannot reverse that.

With agflation, policy has reached a new level of self-parody. Take America’s supposedly verdant ethanol subsidies. It is not just that they are supporting a relatively dirty version of ethanol (far better to import Brazil’s sugar-based liquor); they are also offsetting older grain subsidies that lowered prices by encouraging overproduction. Intervention multiplies like lies. Now countries such as Russia and Venezuela have imposed price controls—an aid to consumers—to offset America’s aid to ethanol producers. Meanwhile, high grain prices are persuading people to clear forests to plant more maize.

Dearer food is a chance to break this dizzying cycle. Higher market prices make it possible to reduce subsidies without hurting incomes. A farm bill is now going through America’s Congress. The European Union has promised a root-and-branch review (not yet reform) of its farm-support scheme. The reforms of the past few decades have, in fact, grappled with the rich world’s farm programmes—but only timidly. Now comes the chance for politicians to show that they are serious when they say they want to put agriculture right.

Cutting rich-world subsidies and trade barriers would help taxpayers; it could revive the stalled Doha round of world trade talks, boosting the world economy; and, most important, it would directly help many of the world’s poor. In terms of economic policy, it is hard to think of a greater good.

Where government help is really needed
Three-quarters of the world’s poor live in rural areas. The depressed world prices created by farm policies over the past few decades have had a devastating effect. There has been a long-term fall in investment in farming and the things that sustain it, such as irrigation. The share of public spending going to agriculture in developing countries has fallen by half since 1980. Poor countries that used to export food now import it.

Reducing subsidies in the West would help reverse this. The World Bank reckons that if you free up agricultural trade, the prices of things poor countries specialise in (like cotton) would rise and developing countries would capture the gains by increasing exports. And because farming accounts for two-thirds of jobs in the poorest countries, it is the most important contributor to the early stages of economic growth. According to the World Bank, the really poor get three times as much extra income from an increase in farm productivity as from the same gain in industry or services. In the long term, thriving farms and open markets provide a secure food supply.

However, there is an obvious catch—and one that justifies government help. High prices have a mixed impact on poverty: they hurt anyone who loses more from dear food than he gains from a higher income. And that means over a billion urban consumers (and some landless labourers), many of whom are politically influential in poor countries. Given the speed of this year’s food-price rises, governments in emerging markets have no alternative but to try to soften the blow.

Where they can, these governments should subsidise the incomes of the poor, rather than food itself, because that minimises price distortions. Where food subsidies are unavoidable, they should be temporary and targeted on the poor. So far, most government interventions in the poor world have failed these tests: politicians who seem to think cheap food part of the natural order of things have slapped on price controls and export restraints, which hurt farmers and will almost certainly fail.

Over the past few years, a sense has grown that the rich are hogging the world’s wealth. In poor countries, widening income inequality takes the form of a gap between city and country: incomes have been rising faster for urban dwellers than for rural ones. If handled properly, dearer food is a once-in-a-generation chance to narrow income disparities and to wean rich farmers from subsidies and help poor ones. The ultimate reward, though, is not merely theirs: it is to make the world richer and fairer.

PARIS (AP) — In what appears to be the largest trading fraud ever carried out by a single person, a young trader at French bank Societe Generale is accused of making unauthorized bets on stock markets that cost the bank nearly $7.2 billion but may not have netted him a cent. The bank called the fraud “exceptional in its size and nature,” and said it apparently went undetected for more than a year by its own multilayered security systems.

It would place the young trader, identified as 31-year-old Jerome Kerviel, atop the pantheon of rogue traders for a scheme from which bank executives said he apparently did not make a personal profit.

Societe Generale Chief Executive Daniel Bouton said Kerviel’s motivations were “totally irrational” but gave no further clues to his motive.

The bank, France’s second-largest, said Thursday it had learned of the fraud last weekend. And the timing could not have been worse: The bank was forced to sell Kerviel’s contracts just as stock markets were plunging worldwide. It took the bank three days to unload them.

Societe Generale said the losses amounted to 4.9 billion euros, or about $7.18 billion — one of history’s biggest banking frauds. It led to immediate calls for tighter regulation.

The fraud also raised comparisons to Nick Leeson, the trader who bankrupted British bank Barings in 1995 after he lost 860 million pounds — then worth $1.38 billion — on Asian futures markets, wiping out the bank’s cash reserves.

Leeson himself told the British Broadcasting Corp. on Thursday that he was not shocked such a fraud had happened again, but “the thing that really shocked me was the size of it.”

Bouton insisted Societe Generale is still financially sound. But the bank said it would need to raise about $8 billion in new capital, partly by selling shares in a rights offer underwritten by JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley.

The company said it expects to post a net profit of 600 million to 800 million euros ($874 million to $1.16 billion) for all of 2007 — even after the fraud and another 2.05 billion euros ($2.99 billion) lost in the subprime mortgage crisis.

Moody’s Investors Service late Thursday downgraded Societe Generale’s bank financial strength rating to “B-” from “B” and assigned a “negative” outlook to the rating, which means the rating could be cut later. Moody’s also downgraded the bank’s long-term debt and deposit ratings to “Aa2″ from “Aa1″ but kept those ratings’ outlooks “stable.”

The downgrade was primarily driven by the fraud losses but also follows Societe Generale’s announcement of the credit-related write-downs, Moody’s said.

Kerviel, employed by the bank since 2000, had worked his way up from a supporting role in an office that monitors trades to a job on the more glamorous futures desk, where he invested the bank’s own money by hedging on European equity market indices — making bets on the future performance of the markets.

Described as a “brilliant” student by one of his former university teachers, he shocked executives with the complexity and scale of his trades. Bouton called the fraud “extraordinarily sophisticated.”

Kerviel was involved in what the bank calls “plain vanilla,” or the more basic forms of hedging, with limited authority. He took home a salary and bonus of less than 100,000 euros, or about $145,700 — relatively modest in the financial world.

The bank said he went far beyond his role — taking “massive fraudulent directional positions” in various futures contracts, betting at the start of this year that stock markets would rise.

He apparently escaped detection by using knowledge of the bank’s control systems gleaned in his earlier monitoring job.

Most of his positions went unnoticed by colleagues and superiors as Kerviel covered his tracks with what the bank described as a “scheme of elaborate fictitious transactions.”

He got caught when markets dropped, exposing him in contracts where he had bet on a rise.

Jean-Pierre Mustier, chief executive of the bank’s corporate and investment banking, said he is convinced Kerviel acted alone. Three union officials representing Societe Generale employees said managers at the bank told them Kerviel was having “family problems.”

Analysts were stunned that such a huge fraud could have occurred more than a decade after the one at Barings.

It shows banks “are still under the threat that an employee with a good understanding of the risk management processes can (get around) them to hide his losses,” said Axel Pierron, a senior analyst with Celent.

Societe Generale said Kerviel had admitted to the fraud and had been dismissed along with some of his bosses. Bouton offered to resign, but the board rejected his offer.

The bank also filed a legal complaint Thursday accusing Kerviel of fraudulent falsification of banking records, use of such records and computer fraud.

Elisabeth Meyer, Kerviel’s lawyer, said on French television network BFM that her client “is not fleeing” and is “available for judicial authorities,” but did not specify where he was.

The lawyer said Kerviel had been suspended on Sunday, and was awaiting formal written notification of the suspension.

The Bank of France, the country’s central bank, said it was immediately informed of the fraud and was investigating. Its governor, Christian Noyer, said the trader had an abnormal knowledge of Societe Generale’s trading systems, and measures would have to be taken to prevent this happening again.

Traders are usually kept to tight spending limits, told “you may trade this much and no more,” said Robert Kolb, a professor of finance at Loyola University Chicago. Those controls apparently failed in this case.

Kolb said he expected “a lot of soul searching” in the industry, and predicted that one upshot might be new measures to prevent people who have previously monitored traders later becoming traders themselves.

“It shows that we are in a very troubled period for banks, and I think that it’s in such troubled periods that difficult things happen,” said Gilles Glicenstein, president of asset management at France’s largest bank, BNP Paribas.

Societe Generale’s shares, which have lost nearly half their value over the past six months, were suspended in Paris on Thursday morning, then dropped 4.1 percent to close at 75.81 euros ($111.16) after they resumed trading.

Founded in 1864 after a decree signed by Napoleon III, Societe Generale employs 120,000 people in 77 countries.

AP writers Matt Moore in Davos, Switzerland, Thomas Wagner in London, and John Leicester, Angela Charlton, Angela Doland, Jamey Keaten and Elaine Ganley in Paris contributed to this report.

It has been a rough 12 months for the stock market, including technology stocks. The S&P 500 is off 2.1% over the past 12 months (dividends excluded) and the Nasdaq 100 Tech Index is off 8.7%. But you could have done well owning the really hot technology companies. A year ago we published our annual list of America’s 25 fastest-growing technology companies. Those stocks have gained 16% over the same time period.

We are back with a new group of 25 rapidly growing technology companies, 12 of which are repeats from our prior list. One company, sixth-ranked Cognizant Technology Solutions (nasdaq: CTSH - news - people ), has appeared every year since the inception of the list six years ago.

Google, Salesforce.com, Ceradyne, Euronet Worldwide, Falconstar Software, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Celgene, Lifecell,

Martek Biosciences, j2 Global Bioscience, Red Hat, Digital River, Genentech, Drs Technologies, L-3 Communications Holdings, Vocus

CommVault Systems, Farro Technologies, Conmtech Communications, Network Appliances, NII Holdings, Diodes, Dolby Labaratories,

Gen-Probe, Adobe Systems

Could nanotechnology help squeeze more oil and gas out of the ground? That’s the hope of a consortium of energy companies that is putting millions of dollars into the development of new micro- and nanosensor technologies.

The seven companies that make up the Advanced Energy Consortium (AEC), which includes Halliburton Energy Services, BP America, and ConocoPhilips, will put up $21 million in total to fund the research. The aim is to develop subsurface sensors that can be used to improve both the discovery and the recovery of hydrocarbons.

“It’s been a long time coming,” says Wade Adams, director of the Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice University, in Houston, a technical partner to the consortium. “It’s the first time the energy companies have got together to fund this kind of research, so it really is a big deal,” he says.

Currently, even with the most advanced recovery techniques, only about 40 percent of the oil and gas in reservoirs can be recovered. The hope is that by injecting novel sensors into these reservoirs, it will be possible to more accurately map them in 3-D, increase the amount of fuel extracted, and minimize the environmental impact.

The financial investment–equivalent to $1 million per year from each company for three years–is “a very good sign,” says Kris Pister, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, who has spent several years developing distributed sensors known as smart dust. It means that the energy companies now understand the potential of small-scale distributed-sensors technologies, he says.

“There is good reason to suspect that this technology could help,” says Pister. Distributed wireless sensor technologies are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and now even have their own wireless standard: the highway addressable remote transducer, or HART.

Right now, the only way to find these reservoirs and gauge their precise size and capacity is through seismic means, or by simply drilling down. “But you don’t get much information,” says Adams. Surface and down-hole seismic techniques have limited resolution, while drilling can only take readings for the two-foot region surrounding the drill bore, he says.

Moreover, oil and gas reservoirs tend not to be formed in huge underground chasms, or wells, as many people think. Instead, the reservoirs are formed in porous rock formations, which act like high-pressure geological sponges, says Scott Tinker, director of the AEC, state geologist of Texas and a professor at the University of Texas, in Austin. “The pores are very small,” he says. They can be anywhere from 10 microns to one micron in diameter. Because of their size, once the initial high pressure of the reservoir has been reduced by releasing some of the oil, this porosity can impede the flow of oil or gas through the rock formation. “It can take a lot of work to get the oil out of the rock,” says Tinker.

What is needed is a means of mapping the pore structure and the voids between formations, he says, and to do this, researchers need sensors that are smaller than the pores. So the aim is to create micro- or nanosensors that can not only pass through the pores, but also form mesh networks to create detailed, 3-D maps of the structure of rock formations.

Another possibility with smaller-sized pores is to use magnetic nanoparticles to enhance aboveground sensing techniques, says Adams. By pumping the sensors into a rock formation, it could be possible to map the formation by detecting slight changes that the nanoparticles create in the earth’s magnetic field.

The researchers believe that, in addition to locating and mapping oil and gas, nanoparticles might also be able to help recover the fuels. “The trouble is that the oil in the pores sticks to the walls,” says Adams, even when high-pressure steam is blasted into the rock. The hope is that with the right nanoparticles, the researchers might be able to free the hydrocarbons from the rock.

Despite this potential, the energy industry hasn’t shown much interest in nanoparticles until now. It was the high price of oil that caused its change of heart, Adams says. “All the big formations have been tapped, and most fields are in depletion. So cheap and easy oil is getting scarcer,” he says.

Pister agrees. “A huge amount of money has been put into traditional extraction techniques,” he says. But these have reached their limits in existing reservoirs. “They are about as tapped out as they can get.”

However, there are lots of challenges ahead. Little is known about how nanoparticles will flow through porous rock. “And we have not generally designed nanoparticles for use at high temperatures and high pressures, nor for extreme chemical environments,” says Adams. If these problems can be overcome, the payoff is likely to be great.

According to the news provider, disappointing earnings from firms such as JP Morgan Chase alongside the current weak state of the US economy are to blame for the disappointing figures.

Francis Lun of Fulbright Securities predicted that the US markets would continue to affect global shares.

“American financial mismanagement has brought us to this economic meltdown,” he said.

Casinos are now using something called NORA or Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness in their surveillance work. Successful investing is now very dependent on monitoring non-obvious relationships between securities. It was the key to doing well in 2007 and will be more so in 2008. This is where many err; looking at a single stock, pair of securities or one asset class when it is the ENTIRE interrelated macro puzzle that needs analyzing as well. Sometimes a stock, bond, commodity, currency or any other security goes up and other times it goes down. Predicting those moves is difficult but some can do it. Their changing relationships opens up anomalies and inefficiencies that can be exploited if you work hard enough to identify them.

That was about a 25% one-day bust and we are now over 15% below the October peak. If we are to get a strong capitulation day it looks like tomorrow would be a good candidate — by capitulation I mean a one-day drop of between 5 and 10%. Will Bernanke and friends step in first and say “uncle” with an inter-meeting cut of .50??? And if they do, will it help or only create a panic and larger capitulation? I eagerly await the board’s answers.