“Chicken noodle soup?” she wondered as she sat at her kitchen table with a pen and notepad. “No, I’ll make chicken and biscuits. That’s more filling.”

These days, Anne has only about $175 each month to spend on food, beyond the eggs, milk and meat that her family’s dairy operation supplies. So this has become her monthly ritual, going through several drafts to create an affordable meal plan that keeps her husband and five kids from going hungry.

She knows the prices from the discount grocery store by heart. Crushed tomatoes for chili: $1 a can. Potato tots for roast pork: $1.69 a bag.

“I wish I could make lasagna, but it’s expensive,” she said.

Cheese is $2.49 for a half a pound. Fresh vegetables are pricey, too, except for cheap bags of onions and potatoes. Even “Fruit?” had a question mark next to it.

When Anne and her husband, Andy, took over his parents’ 305-acre dairy farm in 2013, they made a good living. But years of falling milk prices, complicated by President Donald Trump’s trade wars, have left the couple nearly $200,000 in debt.

Farmers around the country are struggling to pay for basics like groceries and electricity as farm bankruptcies rise and farm debt hitsa historic high. Calls from farmers in financial crisis to state mediators have soared by 57 percent since 2015.

“We’re supposed to be feeding the world, and we can’t even put food on our own table,” Anne said.

She has had less and less money for groceries each month, until one day in October when there was hardly any food in the house, and she started to investigate options she never would have considered before, like food stamps and food pantries.

“This is what need feels like,” she told her husband.

As she worked on the grocery list, her three girls, ages 9 to 13, wandered inside for lunch, clutching hats, gloves and a bunny named Snickers that they wanted to shelter from the cold. There were turkey leftovers from the Thanksgiving meal that only happened because Anne’s sisters had brought most of the food. The girls served themselves.

“Mom, I need cauliflower for my soup – and peppers,” said the oldest, Paige, 13, who makes dinner for the family some nights.

“That’s a big wish list, OK?” said Anne, 40. “Let’s see what we can make happen.”

At one point she looked up from the grocery list and frowned.

“Is that your second sandwich?” she asked Brooke, 9. She was thinking about the only loaf of bread in the house – about her husband and her 15-year-old son, Jason, who had yet to come in from the barn and needed their lunch too.

Chastened, Brooke put the top back on the Miracle Whip.

– – –

It was Anne and Andy’s 18th wedding anniversary, and in between the chores and list-making and snow falling, Anne wanted some time alone with her husband, even if it just meant climbing into his battered Ford pickup to ride into town to get fuel for the tractor. On their honeymoon, the college sweethearts built a bed for the back of Andy’s truck and drove across the United States. There won’t be anything like that or even a date night this year – “that takes moola,” said Breanna, their 11-year-old.

Andy protested at first that Anne had too much to do at home, but by the time they were slip-sliding along the icy road, one of his hands covered hers. After nearly two decades together, the pair still steal kisses until the kids squeal, “Get a room!”

They talked for a while about the custom butcher shop they are building on their property that they hope will one day make things easier financially. But Andy grew quiet when they drove past an empty dairy farm, animals gone, barn collapsed – out of business since the last farm crisis in the 1980s.

“I don’t want to end up like that,” he said.

The decline in the dairy industry – driven by global overproduction and drop in American liquid milk consumption – hit rural New York hard, with the state losing more than 1,100 dairy farms since 2012, according to federal statistics. Then, last year came retaliatory tariffs from Mexico and China on dairy products after Trump-imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum, a $125 million blow to New York’s dairy farmers, according to one state estimate.

About a half a dozen farms have closed around the Lees, and the ones that remain are bad off, Anne says, though self-reliant farmers often don’t discuss their troubles openly.

Anne handles the farm’s finances and juggles the bills by cutoff date, with the top priority keeping the 65 dairy cows – their livelihood – well-fed. She’s stopped answering the landline phone because it’s always bill collectors. The electric company is threatening to shut off their service.

The decline in milk prices has meant a gradual diminishment of what once was a middle-class lifestyle for the Lees – and the food budget that went with it. First they gave up delivery pizza. Then the Sam’s Club membership. Then regular grocery stores. Then apple and blueberry picking at nearby farms in the summer.

Now Andy, 39, misses the Little Debbie snack cakes Anne used to tuck into his sack lunch. Breanna and Brooke miss salad. Jason, a ninth-grader, went out and shot two more deer so the family would have more venison this winter. And then there’s Paige, rarely a complainer, who vaulted to the eighth-grade honor roll for the first time recently by tuning out the stress at home and doing her homework in study hall. Anne has noticed that Paige doesn’t eat half what she usually used to eat, but she hasn’t asked her daughter about it. Some things are private.

The Lees got $4,100 in federal bailout money this year, part of the Trump administration’s $28 billion trade aid package for hurting farmers, which has been criticized for benefiting large operations over family farms. A study by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group found that 60 percent of the money that flowed to New York state went to the top 10 percent of farmers.

The Lees are grateful for what they received, but it’s not enough to make a difference when the milk check is down $4,000 a month, Anne said.

In this part of New York – older, whiter, poorer than other parts of the country – voters chose Donald Trump in decisive percentages during the 2016 presidential race, the Lees among them. Like many farmers, they think their taxes are too high, their creeks and streams are over-regulated and that Trump still has their best interests at heart.

“We’ve had unfair trade for years and years. Somebody had to fix it, and he’s trying to fix it,” Anne said.

“I know a lot of people don’t like it but, you know, this was going to have to happen in order to make U.S. products become more competitive,” said Andy. “It’s going to hurt for a while.”

Anne has tried to help out by getting several part-time jobs – agriculture survey taker, substitute school aide and teacher, liquor store assistant manager and a movie extra at Syracuse’s film hub – which has been hard for Andy to accept.

“I’m supposed to be the primary provider in the house,” he said. “Now I can’t do that, my wife’s got to do that? It means I’m not doing a good enough job.”

He has been so down lately – so sure he’s failing the farm that’s been in the family since 1952 – that Anne couldn’t bring herself to tell him what she was about to do. She’d quietly asked for a Christmas basket from the local community center and learned about a mobile food pantry in a nearby town where she won’t be recognized.

Now she was going to apply for food stamps.

– – –

Anne pulled up in front of the Thomas P. Hoke Human Services Center, a low-slung building painted in red and white stripes. She stepped past the bearded man with a cane sitting on the steps – who seemed oblivious to the cold – entered the building and went through the metal detector.

She was there to finalize her application for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, and had thought there would be a helpful social worker on the other side of the door. Instead she found a documents kiosk and a clerk named Courtney with blue eyeglasses and metal gauges through her stretched earlobes. The waiting room was crowded with families, people coughing, babies crying.

“Put healthy food on the table” a sign on the wall said. Another: “Stop Medicaid Fraud.”

“What are you trying to do today?” Courtney asked.

“I don’t know; I’ve never been here. I just want to do my SNAP,” Anne said. “Do I need to give my federal tax return or my state tax return or what?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Courtney said.

Anne scanned her pay stubs from her various jobs, which last year earned her $5,330. Then the Schedule F tax form that showed net farm income of -$12,979.

“Is there anything I can do today to find out if I get approved?” she asked.

They’d get back to her in 24 to 48 hours, Courtney said. Or by Monday, someone else said later in the day when she called in to check. Or in three weeks when she’d be notified in the mail, a third person said.

Anne was skeptical about whether she would be approved for benefits, anyway. An estimated 197,000 farmers, farmworkers, fishermen and forestry workers use SNAP, according to a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, but farmers say they sometimes find it difficult to qualify because of complicated rules governing self-employment income. And the Trump administration has long-term plans to tighten SNAP eligibility for many.

But Anne had hoped to get her benefits before Christmas, which might free up a little extra money for simple gifts for the kids, like gloves or a dinosaur toy for her youngest, Levi, 6. Now it didn’t look like that was happening.

“This sucks,” she said.

She was back on the street in less than 20 minutes, far faster than expected, regretting paying $1 for two hours of street parking.

“Before, we were very private,” she said as she climbed into her car. “Now I feel like everybody can see our entire life.”

– – –

This is what need feels like.

The regulars at the monthly food giveaway outside a little white church in Richford, New York, start lining up at 6:30 a.m., holding their places in line with a kind of honor system of laundry baskets and wheeled grocery carts, then return to their cars to wait out of the cold. Anne showed up around 10, clutching grocery bags, and surveyed the place-savers stretched down the block.

“I’m not prepared for this,” she said.

The night before, she’d curled up in the leaf-green wing chair she’d put in an upstairs closet and opened her rose-patterned journal.

“Tomorrow, we go to the food bank,” she wrote. “Andy doesn’t know. I’m afraid if he knows it will upset him. I am so nervous about going. I don’t want people to judge me. I don’t want someone to recognize me and the kids find out and get picked on at school. It is very nerve wracking. But my mom always said it’s there for people that need a helping hand. Use it when you need to and help support it when you don’t. So maybe I can help volunteer.”

Now she was shivering in line, jumping up and down, waiting for the food truck to arrive. Organizers with raw, gloveless hands tried to check everybody in, but the computer was running slow.

“Look at her, she’s doing the hop, skip and jump,” one of the regulars said about Anne.

Finally the truck, a mobile food pantry from the Food Bank of the Southern Tier, pulled in and unfurled its doors, and the line began to move. Volunteers passed out milk, eggs, apple juice, frozen vegetables, tomato soup, chickpeas, cornflakes, canned pears, potatoes and rice. Anne grabbed two bags of apples and six bags of grapes. Fruit would be a question mark on the list no longer.

It was more than she could carry. It was almost more than could fit in the trunk of her car.

“Pretty good deal, huh?” said Peggy Andersen, one of the volunteers.

“I’m really excited,” Anne said.

Anne was able to cross so many items off her master grocery list that once she got to Aldi she only spent $73.12, and then another $39.38 at the scratch-and-dent store that sells day-old bread and dented cans of food. She was $62.50 under her $175 budget. Now, she may be able to keep the lights on in the house and put a little toward the $459 electric bill.

Back at home, the slate-blue farmhouse with the tin star over the door, the grocery bags covered the kitchen table, the pine bench where the kids sit and do homework, and the floor. There was so much food it would not all fit in the refrigerator, and some items would have to be stored on the side porch.

Andy came in from the barn for coffee and gave the spread a quizzical once-over, and Anne quickly copped to her stop at the food pantry. A complicated look passed over his face that she later explained was part relief – that she hadn’t bought all of it herself – and part defeat that she had to ask for help.

“We gotta do what we gotta do, I guess,” he said, and went back outside.

Later, the kids discovered the few treats Anne had bought at Aldi – $1.49 onion bagels for Brooke, the fourth-grader, and $1.49 off-brand cocoa rice cereal for Levi, the first-grader. They started eating fistfuls of the grapes.

“Mom, where did you get all these grapes?” Brooke asked.

“They gave them to us. At the food pantry,” Anne answered.

“Tell them that we love them!” Levi said loudly.

– – –

In the evenings, the children put on their Carhartt coveralls and help Andy with chores in the barn, even Levi, working to unwind hay to feed the Holsteins from a bale bigger than he is. One night after chores, they paused to play before dinner. The kids slid down a small hill on a plastic sled and Grandpa’s old Flexible Flyer, the dogs barking and following them down. Snowballs arced through the air, followed by shrieks and laughter. A fat little half-moon rose.

Pretty soon it was time to go in. The family gathered around the table, and Brooke made scratch-and-dent store hot cocoa with rainbow marshmallows for everyone as others started dishing up dinner, which was tangy crockpot chicken with canned carrots and baked beans.

Anne, scrolling through Facebook, saw a hopeful headline.

“Hey, Andy,” she said. “Listen to this.”

Anne, and then Brooke, began to read out loud a Farm Progress article that quoted two University of Wisconsin at Madison economists predicting a further rise in the price of milk and “good times ahead for dairy farmers.” A first phase of the trade deal with China still to be finalized might also bring some relief.

“So, is it going to be better for us in 2020?” Breanna asked.

“It’s always going to be better for us in 2020, and 2021, and 2022,” said Anne.

“Have to be positive,” said Andy.

“We’re all still together and we all still have a roof over our heads,” Anne said.

“I mean about milk prices,” Breanna said.

“I guess that’s what they’re saying,” Anne said.

Then Levi wanted to know if there were any baked beans left, and Anne put the phone down to help him get more food.

Speculations is mounting that China will work to fill its wheat-buying quota as part of the detente, a pledge it failed to stick to in the past. While the allotment, set by the World Trade Organization, could be filled by supplies from any country, it still means additional global demand at a time the market is tighter.

Purchases of soybeans, meanwhile, are likely to be hampered by a deadly pig disease that’s reducing demand. The oilseed is crushed to make cooking oil and meal, a key ingredient in hog feed.

“The potential that China could secure an additional 5 to 6 million tons of world wheat annually is underpinning Chicago Board of Trade wheat,” Chicago-based consultant AgResource Co. said in a report Thursday.

Wheat traders expect China will soon release the quota, according to AgResource, and prices are already reacting. On Friday, futures for March delivery rose as much as 2.2% to $5.61 a bushel in Chicago, the highest for a most-active contract since August 2018. Futures traded in Paris reached the highest since June.

If Chinese purchases were to reach the quota mark of 9.6-million metric tons, that would represent a big jump in demand. In the six years through 2017, buying has averaged less than 50% of the allotment.

China will likely fill its quota with the cheapest wheat in the market. While that’s usually grain from the Black Sea, U.S. supplies have been getting more competitive and international buyers have recently turned to American shipments.

In the week ended Dec. 19, American exporters sold 715,000 tons of U.S. wheat. That follows the previous week’s sales of 868,600 tons, which was the most in six years, according to USDA figures, excluding skewed data released after the federal government shutdown earlier this year.

Relatively tighter corn supplies in South America and wheat in top shipper Russia have made American grain more competitively priced. Heavy rain in Europe is also making it harder for growers there to plant, with Consultants Strategie Grains expecting the crop to drop by 3.6% in the European Union. In western Australia, wheat yields have been disappointing due to hot and dry weather.

China hasn’t purchased significant volumes of American supply since October. But, underscoring U.S. wheat’s competitiveness in world markets, other top Asian importers including Indonesia, Japan, Philippines and Taiwan have snatched up supplies in recent weeks, according to USDA data.

Corn could also benefit if China moves to fill grain quotas, but to a smaller degree. At 7.2 million tons, the allotment is not only smaller, but the Asian nation has historically done a better job of filling it, meaning it wouldn’t represent a very big increase in demand.

“The impact on corn values is far less,” AgResource said.

The Personal Data Protection Act, B.E. 2562 (2019) regarding the collection, use, or disclosure of personal data will come into effect on May 28, 2020.

The association’s president Predee Daochai has said that banks might have to adjust their working process to be in compliance with the law.

For example, he said, they need to request clients’ consent and ask them to sign on the consent every time the banks want to collect, use, and disclose their personal data. Each individual client has the right to agree or reject such a request.

The association has set up a team to study the law and its possible impacts on the banks, he added.

Thakorn Piyapan, head of Krungsri Consumer Group, said banks would feel the impacts from personal data protection law and the debt collection law next year, adding that further study is needed as banks must ensure maximum protection of clients’ data.

Protection of clients’ data goes beyond confinement of the banks, it also covers their merchant partners.

He said that Krungsri is considering using technology to convert client data transfers between the bank and its merchant partners in the way that, if leaked, their identities will not be known.

From trade to spending, from the Federal Reserve to paid parental leave, Trump has embraced policy changes that historically are more in line with the approach of Democrats than Republicans in establishing a forceful role for government in setting the terms of the economy.

It is a sharp contrast to his first two years, when his main achievements included cutting regulations and a significant tax overhaul that emphasized reducing corporate tax rates – traditional bastions of policymaking for the GOP.

Trump has still pursued cuts to government spending that pinch poorer Americans – tightening rules on food stamp and allowing states to reduce Medicaid enrollment, for instance – that have fueled constant Democratic accusations he has betrayed voters.

But the breadth of Trump’s break with the GOP is striking.

On trade, Trump has reached a “phase one” trade deal with China that reportedly includes promises to buy far more in U.S. exports. He has completed a revamp of the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada that some liberals are cheering for labor protection and pharmaceutical policies.

Trump co-opted a demand from the left to urge the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates despite the relatively strong economy, a position the central bank ultimately adopted after seeing signs the economic expansion might waver.

The president has blown away traditional GOP concerns over the rising federal deficit, cutting bipartisan deals to expand government spending and even extend a new paid leave benefit to the federal workforce. He unilaterally implemented a farm bailout that could prove more expensive than the auto bailout was a decade ago – a move that conservatives had criticized as wasting taxpayer dollars.

And while taking action against President Barack Obama’s health care law in court, the Trump administration has avoided moves to immediately blow up the law while pushing to allow states to import cheaper prescription drugs – a longtime liberal position opposed by many Republicans.

Trump’s steps away from conservative economic orthodoxy have been building since the 2016 presidential campaign, when he shocked GOP elites on his way to a blowout victory in the Republican primary. But in many ways they appeared to reach their culmination in 2019.

“The administration this year has appeared to change its focus away from working with Congress on more typical Republican proposals, and toward an increasing focused on populist priorities,” said William Hoagland, senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center and former Republican staff director for the Senate Budget Committee.

Some analysts say the emphasis on populist economics could upend the 2020 presidential election, as the issues that may have helped give Democrats control of the House in the 2018 midterms – particularly the attempt to repeal Obamacare and the Republican tax law – could recede while other White House initiatives become more prominent.

The Trump administration is likely to continue its aggressive trade actions in its fourth year, turning to negotiations with the United Kingdom, Europe, and possibly India and Vietnam, said Peter Navarro, assistant to the president for trade and manufacturing policy, in an interview.

These economic priorities serve as a contrast with the highly partisan politics of impeachment, which is expected to play out with a Senate trial early next year.

Democrats maintain Trump sold out his working-class base to the GOP donor class after his election, but the attack may grow less potent as the tax cut in particular loses its immediacy.

Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster at Lake Research Partners, said that Democratic elites such as lawmakers, think tank leaders, and consultants have been alarmed by Trump’s economic populism.

“Typically, Republicans offer things like the deficit and the stock market – the upscale economic agenda – but Trump is trying to include the semblance of a working class economic agenda,” she said. “It isn’t real when you look underneath the hood, but it sure looks real absent an alternative.”

Trump’s policy shift also illustrates his power over congressional Republicans.

Two core party constituencies for decades – free market traders and deficit hawks – are at risk of being effectively exiled from the GOP, as some Republican lawmakers quietly fume at being sidelined repeatedly over policy matters.

“I see the restraints coming off all over the place. It’s been a less cautious approach as Trump has realized he doesn’t have to pay attention to traditional Republican advisers,” said Ed Dolan, an economist at the Niskanen Center, a libertarian-leaning think tank. “There don’t seem to be any conservative voices around him anymore that disagree with him.”

Less trade uncertainty, lower interest rates and more government spending will mean an economy growing faster than it otherwise would, even if expectations remain for a modest 2 percent growth in 2020. That could be a boon to the president’s reelection prospects, though Democrats say Americans are still hurt by stagnant wages and widespread economic anxiety.

Trump’s policies could still create longer term risk.The surge in federal deficits and cuts to interest rates may limits the tools America has to respond to an economic downturn, should one arrive in the final year of Trump’s first term or later.

And, politically, Trump could remain vulnerable on health care, a top concern among voters, having overseen a rise in both costs and the number of people without insurance.

“I really say it’s mostly lip-service,” said Dean Baker, an economist at the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research, of Trump’s populism while in office. “If you look at his big changes, it’s really the tax cut that went to the top 1 percent and there’s no dispute from that. The rich have really benefited and everyone else gets a show.”

Trump may point to steady economic growth and historically low unemployment numbers, but critics say those are largely disconnected from his populist economic policies.

“Most of the jobs that have been created are in the services-type industries – his constituency in the middle of the country may not be helped by a lot of these policies,” said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG Union Bank. “And trying to change these forces of globalization – it won’t have an impact for 10 or 20 years, if it happens at all. These are very slow-moving forces.”

Kayleigh McEnany, a spokeswoman for Trump’s reelection campaign, said in a statement: “Trump promised to change decades of failed trade policy, revive manufacturing, and bring relief to middle class families. He has done all that and more.”

Trump’s presidency began with an unsuccessful effort to undo President Obama’s 2010 health care legislation, which would have cut federal spending but also cost millions of Americans their health insurance. Republicans then united successfully around a more than $1.5 trillion tax cut.

“When Trump first came into office, the priorities he agreed with – the tax bill, repealing Obamacare – required legislation, and so he needed hill Republicans led by orthodox conservative Paul D. Ryan,” said Doug Holtz-Eakin, a Republican economist and former director of the Congressional Budget Office.

But since Democrats gained control of the House starting in 2019, the White House has either had to compromise with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., or act unilaterally.

“What changed this year is that for the policy issues on the table he could move unilaterally, and he did,” Holtz-Eakin said. “These are nontraditional Republican positions and they have come to the fore in the past year.”

Among the most serious clashes with his own party has been over trade. Republicans have traditionally resisted tariffs and supported large business groups in their quest for expanding international markets. Democrats have typically led the charge to crack down on China trade practices and revamp NAFTA.

Trump flipped this dynamic upside-down. After blasting America’s trade relations with foreign nations as a presidential candidate, Trump took action on the issue by launching a trade war with China and slapping increasingly aggressive tariffs on other countries.

Business groups that had been strongly supportive of the tax overhaul criticized Trump for raising prices for American consumers and disrupting global supply chains.

Trump’s advisers were in the meantime willing to agree to significant concessions to House Democrats and labor groups to seal a new trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, angering some Republicans but also earning the pact bipartisan cover.

“Trump’s unique brand of populism is essentially an economic nationalism based on an America first perspective, applied to both domestic policies and the international trade arena. This revolution has repositioned the Republican Party into the party of the working class,” said Navarro, the Trump trade adviser.

“In the past, Republicans were willing to sacrifice our economy on the altar of national security – but if you do that you wind up losing both.”

Perhaps just as surprising is how Trump has upended the GOP positions on both monetary and fiscal policy.

The president demanded Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell reverse course and back off raising interest rates. At the same time, the president has rejected Fed nominees pushed by traditional conservatives who likely would have raised rates.

“It seems that [Trump’s] appointments are fully on board for the critique leftists have been making about monetary policy,” said Sam Bell, founder and policy director of Employ America, a left-leaning organization advocating on economic policy.

A spending splurge under Trump may mark an even more dramatic retreat in conservative economic policy, as annual deficits have risen to close to $1 trillion despite the sustained run of economic growth.

Trump campaigned on preventing cuts to Social Security and Medicare, largely bucking long-standing GOP calls to reduce the national deficit by targeting America’s two large government programs. In practice, his administration has gone even further than avoiding cuts to those programs, expanding federal spending in multiple budget deals while opportunistically using them to win concessions on other priorities, such as Space Force.

Trump’s policy opportunism may be novel for American politics, but his grab bag of economic positions fits a bigger global trend of conservative populists like Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom, who has pledged to increase spending on Britain’s national health program.

“Populist forces are a global phenomenon. They cut across the traditional left-right cleavage. Many populists aren’t traditional free-market neoliberals or fiscal conservatives in their economic policies,” said Pippa Norris, a political scientist at Harvard.

Whether that will permanently remake the Republican Party, on the other hand, remains an open question.

“Republican lawmakers privately still believe the deficit is a problem and support free trade – but they’re not going to say that publicly because it’s not where their voters are,” said Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the libertarian-leaning Manhattan Institute. “I’m not sure Trump has changed the minds of Republican lawmakers as much as he has won over the base and lawmakers understand crossing the president is political suicide.”

The S&P 500 started the year by rising in nine of the first 10 weeks. Now it’s closing it out with gains in 11 out of the past 12, a feat of concerted advances that occurred only once before since 1985. The Nasdaq Composite index just missed climbing for a 12 straight day, the most in a decade, and, up 12.7%, is on pace for its best fourth quarter since 2004.

While a category of Wall Street wags starts panicking when gains come this easy, anyone who heeded warnings about euphoria after the Nasdaq surged 16.5% in the first quarter has missed a 16.7% jump since it ended. Gains don’t always beget losses in the stock market — ask anyone who has watched the Faang stocks triple after he sold them in 2013.

Stocks ended Friday mixed as traders assessed a rally that’s added more than $5 trillion to equities this year, but the S&P 500 notched a fifth straight weekly advance and the Nasdaq Composite jumped above 9,000 for the first time. Blue-chip companies led the Dow Jones Industrial Average to a record high. The dollar slid against most of its major peers. Treasuries rose. Oil rebounded from Friday’s lows as a government report showed U.S. crude inventories sank to a two-month low.

While it’s been a big December melt-up for the S&P 500, technical warning signs of a climax may be brewing. The index is edging ever closer to the upper band of its trading envelope, while its GTI Global Strength Indicator — a measure of upward and downward movements of successive closing prices — reveals the deepest overbought territory in all of 2019.

“There’s almost no identifiable news/events that would derail the rally over the next few days,” according to Tom Essaye, a former Merrill Lynch trader who founded “The Sevens Report” newsletter. Still, nearly “all of the December gains have come on almost no material news — and that should temper the optimism a bit,” he wrote.

Earlier Friday, equities got a lift from reports of strong holiday-season revenue, with e-commerce sales jumping, which reassured traders that American consumers are feeling confident. A solid rebound for industrial profits in China also buoyed sentiment, with investors now looking to the initial trade deal with the U.S. to sustain gains in the new year.

These are some of the main moves in markets:

Stocks

–The S&P 500 index was little changed at 4 p.m. New York time.

–The Stoxx Europe 600 index advanced 0.2%.

–The MSCI Asia Pacific index jumped 0.5%.

Currencies

–The Bloomberg Dollar Spot index sank 0.4%.

–The euro jumped 0.7% to $1.1176.

–The Japanese yen strengthened 0.2% to 109.43 per dollar.

Bonds

–The yield on 10-year Treasuries dipped two basis points to 1.87%.

–Germany’s 10-year yield fell one basis point to -0.26%.

–Britain’s 10-year yield declined one basis point to 0.755%.

Commodities

–The Bloomberg Commodity index increased 0.1%.

–West Texas Intermediate crude was little changed.

–Gold climbed 0.1% to $1,515.20 an ounce.

Chairperson Sakon Varunyuwatana said the commission would decide if new rules are needed in governing the fast growing e-commerce sector.

However, if new regulations are to be issued, the commission would ensure that they will not have a negative impact on growth of the  sector, he said.

The business has high value with most of the trading  platforms located abroad.

He said while the government promotes the e-commerce industry, there are reports of small online shops being taken advantage of by dominant players, adding that the commission will study the business structures of both local and foreign operators.

According to the Electronic Transactions Development Agency, the value of e-commerce market in Thailand is expected to reach Bt3.80 trillion this year, up 20 per cent year on year.

Sakon said the commission had set up a taskforce to closely monitor the  trend of merger and acquisition next year.

Under trade competition law, companies need the commission’s approval for such a move.

Every part of the growing process is meticulously documented and evaluated to refine the process.

After 20 years of experience, legal marijuana growers in the U.S. have the reputation of creating the best product in the world, scientifically grown and tightly regulated for quality and safety.

The crop would be in high demand internationally – perhaps the centerpiece of a new U.S. industry – if not for the regulatory conundrum in which growers operate.

Because marijuana is legal in many states but still illegal federally, marijuana growers are unable to ship their products to other countries or even other American states that have legalized the drug. So while U.S. cannabis firms have driven product innovation and mastered large-scale grow operations, they restlessly wait for the export curtain to lift.

Instead Canada has emerged as the dominant exporter in the burgeoning global marijuana trade, which ArcView Market Research and BDS Analytics estimated at $14.9 billion in sales for 2019. Companies are raising capital and building international trade ties despite Canada’s unlikely climate to be an agricultural pot haven.

“Canada has a huge advantage, because they can fill a gap,” said Rezwan Khan, vice president of global corporate development for cannabis seed supplier DNA Genetics.

– – –

California’s growers have been developing legal marijuana products since 1996, longer than everywhere but Amsterdam. Khan describes the state as “the epicenter of cannabis culture.”

California’s cannabis seeds have been distributed all over the world, and many foreign firms are trying to reproduce the quality of West Coast marijuana.

The genetics and sophistication underlying the U.S. cannabis industry lead to better-quality and higher-potency flowers for those who smoke marijuana and innovations in oils, tinctures and edibles.

“The world wants that technology,” said Michael Sassano, CEO of Solaris Farms, the largest cannabis hybrid greenhouse in Nevada. “The Netherlands had a big jump; they could have done anything. But the U.S. is the one that turned the industry into what it is today, with all the products we make, not Canada.”

The other draw of American-grown cannabis, according to Denver-based cannabis law expert Bob Hoban, is that foreign customers value the regulatory oversight that ensures the product is safe and unadulterated.

“It’s being regulated by a government agency, which is not necessarily what’s happening around the rest of the world,” Hoban said.

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But because federal law prohibits the sale and use of marijuana, growers have not had easy access to the banking system. LivWell had to pay cash for its HVAC system. And with sales limited to in-state retailers, it hasn’t been cost-effective to invest in automation for its production line. Most of its processing and packaging is done by hand.

The patchwork of legalization means cannabis isn’t always grown where it’s easiest to grow, in warm climates with limited rainfall. It’s grown where it’s legal. California, Oregon and Colorado grow most of the country’s authorized marijuana as legally isolated islands.

That leaves cold Canada as a somewhat odd choice to be the world’s leader in marijuana exports.

When Canada legalized marijuana in 2018, its firms could be listed on the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. So Canadian companies represent a back door for U.S. firms to access capital and export markets, and for smaller firms, a potential exit strategy. Many U.S. marijuana growers are positioning themselves as attractive acquisition targets for Canadian firms eyeing the U.S. market.

Canadian firms are using their head start to sign trade deals and secure licenses to sell marijuana internationally. While the market remains limited, at least 30 countries – including Mexico, Germany and Italy – have legalized medical marijuana. And the numbers are growing as scientific studies have demonstrated its utility for pain control, nausea and glaucoma.

“There’s more than enough time for American companies to catch up,” said Kris Krane, president of 4Front Ventures, which grows and sells marijuana in nine states. “But the longer that we wait, the longer we continue to maintain this unsustainable prohibition, the more difficult it’s going to be for American companies to catch up.”

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Changing public sentiments about marijuana in the U.S. have many American cannabis firms readying for the day they can legally sell their products elsewhere.

“If the state borders do break open, we’re preparing for that,” said Sassano, who also is board chairman at Soma Pharma, a holding company based in Dublin that distributes medical cannabis products to pharmacies across Europe.

That means an industry that began mainly as small mom-and-pop growers and retailers must now consider its corporate hygiene and whether it’s meeting legal requirements to sell in these new markets.

LivWell is building large-scale indoor cannabis growing rooms in Colorado and Oregon designed to scale up production for interstate or international commerce. The new rooms have 30- to 40-foot-high ceilings and state-of-the-art LED lighting cool enough to sit close to the plants.

“Then you farm vertically,” said Dean Heizer, LivWell’s chief legal strategist. “We learned that from the microgreens that people are farming in old cities and in old skyscrapers. If you can cultivate in cubic meters, you can scale. If you’re cultivating in square feet, you can’t.”

With 11 states plus Washington, D.C., approving recreational use and 33 states legalizing medical marijuana, industry insiders believe marijuana may be legalized nationally in the near future, greatly expanding their market.

In November, the House Judiciary Committee passed a bill with more than 50 co-sponsors that would effectively make marijuana legal in the U.S. Though unlikely to pass Congress immediately, it is seen as a sign of hope for the future.

“It’s just a matter of time,” Krane said. “How much time is very much a question of debate.”

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This report is a producer of Kaiser Health News, a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.