US egg prices boil over as avian flu and feed costs hit supplies

Egg prices in the US soared in 2022 and prices in December were nearly three times higher than a year before on an inflation adjusted basis.

Supply was constrained because of the spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) among hens.

This has led to a loss of more than 40mn egg-laying hens, reducing domestic supplies of eggs by roughly 7.5 per cent per month on average, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

Rising input costs have also contributed to the increase in prices, in particular the soaring cost of energy and feed last year as a result of the war in Ukraine and the global economic recovery since Covid lockdowns.

Shotaro Tani

Our other charts of the week . . . 

China’s trade with Russia hit a record high of $190bn in 2022 as Beijing became Moscow’s main trading partner.

Trade between the two nations was up more than 30 per cent on 2021 according to the Chinese government.

This came as Russian trade with the EU contracted sharply after western nations imposed sanctions in response to Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February.

The sanctions have contributed to redrawing the global trade map as Russia tries to cushion the impact of sanctions by selling more in other markets, while China and other countries such as India step in to purchase cheap energy.

Sam Joiner and Chris Campbell

Independents are the largest political group in the US. They began to outnumber Republicans and Democrats in the 1990s. Their scale dropped in the early 2000s but the share of independents rose to more than 40 per cent in all but the 2016 and 2020 election years.

According to the Pew Research Center, the level reached in recent years represents the highest percentage of independents since public opinion polling started in 1939.

Members of Generation X and millennials continue to identify as independents as they age, according to Gallup analysis. Previously, US adults tended to gravitate more towards either the Republican or Democratic parties as they got older.

Federica Cocco

Young contemporary artists across the world made record-breaking auction debuts last year.

Although some had previously held noteworthy exhibitions and secured leading gallery representation, their sales demonstrated buyers’ growing interest in them.

Sales prices for artists’ auction debuts that reached higher price brackets than expected and broke records ranged from $119,000 to $441,000, according to research by Artsy, an online marketplace for art.

Although Lucy Bull’s abstract piece “8:50, 2020” sold for $1.4mn, female artists tended to sell at lower prices. The median price of art sold by women was $176,400, in comparison to their male counterparts who averaged $201,680.

The majority of these artists were born between 1985 and 1991. The youngest artist to achieve a record-breaking debut last year was Andres Valencia, born in 2011 in the US and known for his colourful figurative painting influenced by Cubism.

Justine Williams

Remote working has become far more common since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, an analysis of job adverts suggests.

Even though most countries have reopened their economies, the proportion of jobs being advertised which mention remote working remains far higher than it was before, according to the figures from the OECD and jobs site Indeed.

There are a broad range of effects on economies. Businesses adopting remote work may be able to draw from a larger talent pool, but on the other hand some research suggests that remote work can impede informal knowledge-sharing.

Workers who can work from home may have cheaper travel costs and more freedom in deciding where to live; this can have consequences for housing prices. One study suggested that the adoption of remote work has been responsible for most of the increase in US house prices during the pandemic, as workers sought out larger properties.

Federica Cocco

A weaker yen and soaring energy costs plunged Japan into a trade deficit of ¥19.9tn ($153bn) in 2022, its largest since 1979 when comparable records started.

Japan recorded 30 consecutive years of trade surpluses since 1981, owing to strong exports. But since the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 and the subsequent shutdown of the country’s entire reactor fleet, the world’s third-largest economy has had to import a lot of fossil fuels to run its power stations, resulting in a trade deficit.

Japan will continue to need to import fossil fuels, and export growth is widely expected to be subdued as global growth struggles to gain momentum. As a result, economists believe Japan’s trade deficits are likely to linger.

Shotaro Tani

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Welcome to our first online Datawatch. Regular readers of the print edition of the Financial Times might recognise it from its weekday home on the front page. Datawatch showcases statistical insights that have grabbed the attention of our data journalists — anywhere and on any topic.

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