Garbled Government Data Release Flusters Grain Traders

Grain traders have already had plenty to worry about this year, including war, drought and inflation. This week, they faced a new challenge: faulty government data.

The U.S. Agriculture Department’s Foreign Agriculture Service attempted on Thursday to roll out its updated system for reporting weekly export sales. The data release quickly raised eyebrows among those in the market due to numbers that diverged wildly from expectations.