Betting the Business

The Archer Daniels Midland company issued a press release Thursday announcing that Fortune magazine has ranked it the world’s most admired company in the food production industry.

By the way, alongside all of that food production they do, ADM has a financial subsidiary. Not that they hide it. It’s right there on the web-site under the tab “Financial Subsidiaries”.

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Correction: The original version of this post used the phrase “Derivatives Dealer” in the title instead of “Bank” and said that ADM’s financial subsidiary “deals derivatives.” Both ADM’s website and its 10K straightforwardly declare that ADM operates a financial subsidiary, and the services offered clearly touch the derivatives markets. But the term ‘dealer’ is term of art, even if one that has different meanings in different contexts including now a legal context. I have no personal knowledge of ADM’s specific activities beyond the website or 10K, so it was sloppy on my part, and potentially misleading, to attach the specific term ‘derivative dealing’ to the broad category of financial services ADM offers. I owe thanks to the pair of readers who called my attention to this. Since the original purpose of the post was to highlight the fact that a number of end-users operate financial businesses alongside their physical business, and since the specific type of financial activity is irrelevant to that point, I corrected the phrasing of the post.