TUESDAY, DEC. 11, 2018  |  IN THIS ISSUE 

 
Global grain trader Bunge is looking for a new CEO after the departure of Soren Schroder, who stepped down amid shareholder pressure and a prolonged decline in crop prices, reports the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. After fighting off takeover bids from rival ADM and commodities trader Glencore, Bunge bowed to demands of investors earlier this fall by adding three board members. It also later named ag chemical maker Syngenta's CEO Erik Frywald to the board, reports Reuters. 
 
Bunge's plan to take its time naming a permanent CEO creates an opportunity for ADM to take another run at buying the company, reports Crain's Chicago Business. A deal, if it happens, would give the ag industry's "ABCD" foursome -  ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus - the biggest shakeup in a generation. 
PIowa's budget more downturn-proof than most states'

Iowa's state budget is better prepared than most to handle a recession, according to a new analysis by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Gazette reports. The study looked at all 50 states' reserve balances as a percentage of spending and the volatility of each state's revenues, ranking Iowa in the top 10 in terms of ability to weather a downturn. Iowa's annual budget fluctuations are lower than average, according to the organization; the state is also among those with rainy day fund deposits not tied to economic or revenue volatility. Sixteen states decide how much to set aside based on end-of-year surpluses.
 
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is insisting that Wells Fargo keep a lid on its growth until it has hardened its risk management policies to prevent any further customer abuse, Reuters reports. In February, the Fed ordered Wells Fargo to keep its assets below $1.95 trillion until it put new checks on senior management, but the company is months behind schedule on submitting an acceptable reform plan. "We do not intend to lift the asset cap until remedies to these issues have been adopted and implemented to our satisfaction," Mr. Powell wrote in a letter to U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren. The decision on lifting Wells Fargo's asset cap will be determined by a Fed board vote, reports American Banker.

San Francisco-based Instacart, which boasts a community of 70,000 contract shoppers across the U.S. and Canada and has attracted $1.6 billion in funding, is facing organizing and boycott efforts from those same independent agents, reports the Chicago Tribune. Complaints against the shopping service and delivery company are nothing new, but a recent change aimed at matching shoppers' earnings to the time and difficulty of each order is provoking the new round of resistance.

Instacart is active in Iowa, but with consumers increasingly ordering everything from lunch to clothing and expecting to see it hit their doorsteps within hours, chains like Hy-Vee, Aldi and Walmart are rolling out their own same-day delivery in markets across the state, the CBJ previously reported. Stepped-up online grocery efforts are being driven in part by Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods and by Walmart's national push to expand online grocery delivery to 100 cities by year's end.
Story5Airlines find magic elixir in 'ancillary revenue'
 
Starting Friday, United Airlines will charge coach passengers a fee for so-called preferred seats - even though they don't come with extra legroom or other perks, reports CNBC. They're just the standard economy seats blessed with a little more space when they're behind the Economy Plus rows. Rivals American Airlines and Delta Air Lines are already surcharging for such seats, making the basic cost of an airline ticket ever less meaningful. Ancillary revenues now account for almost half the total revenues at some carriers, and the numbers keep growing every year, reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. IdeaWorks, which issues an annual study on the subject, calls ancillary revenue "the elixir that enables airlines to offer headline grabbing low fares while maintaining a predictable revenue flow from the sale of optional extras."
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