Bolls, bales and Bismarck.

• Author: Gearino, G.D.
• Position: FINEPRINT

Let's have some fun and put a financial twist on the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, in which you seek to trace the connections between Point A and Point B in the fewest number of steps. In the original game, you count the links between the actor and any other randomly selected person. In our version, we'll trace the steps between North Carolina's cotton farmers and Otto von Bismarck, who in the 19th century not only created the modern German state but also somehow managed to get a city in North Dakota named after him. Ready? OK, let's go.

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The state's cotton industry of course, is nothing like it used to be. In many ways, that's a good thing, considering that in the antebellum period it depended on slave labor and in the postbellum era on sharecroppers--of whom there were more every year, growing more cotton, selling it for less and becoming collectively poorer all along. Today, the state's cotton farmers are growing less and selling it for more, a circumstance only loosely explained by supply and demand. I'll trace that fact to Germany's Iron Chancellor in just a couple of steps here, but first I have to brag: I can claim just three degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon. He once starred in a movie with Elizabeth Perkins (there's one), who appears in the TV show Weeds, in which Matthew Modine once guest-starred (there's two). And Modine starred in a movie based upon one of my books. It was filmed in Wilmington; he and I had lunch together one day--which gives me a Bacon score of three. But if you're not impressed, you're in good company. This fact has never so much as gotten me a free drink in a bar.

Back to cotton: A little over a month ago, farmers from across Eastern North Carolina gathered in Kinston for their annual meeting to catch up on the state of the global cotton market. They learned some encouraging news from a fellow named John Flanagan, a North Carolina-based cotton trader and market analyst. He believes the price of cotton, which climbed above $1 per pound last year, could go as high as $1.75 this year. He cited a number of reasons for this, upon which he elaborated when I caught up to him later.

One is that our cotton-growing homeboys are the beneficiaries of other people's weather problems. Flooding in Pakistan last year destroyed millions of bales of cotton, while Australia--another major cotton producer--had its own catastrophic weather event earlier this year. Not to be cold-blooded, but what's...