logo
Chicago soybeans flat on favourable weather, soyoil supports

Chicago soybeans flat on favourable weather, soyoil supports

Zawya17-06-2025
BEIJING/PARIS - Chicago soybean futures were flat on Tuesday, torn between favourable U.S. crop weather and still strong soyoil prices despite a small fall after a sharp two-day rally, fuelled by surging crude oil and stronger U.S. biofuel blending mandates. The most-active soybean contract was unchanged at $10.69-3/4 per bushel, as of 1145 GMT. Soybeans had touched a one-month high and soyoil a 20-month high on Monday. Analysts said Iran-Israel tensions could add volatility to grain markets through energy price shocks. "At present eyes across all markets are on what is occurring in the Middle East," said Andrew Whitelaw, agricultural consultant at Episode 3. "The region is a huge contributor to the energy markets, and these markets have a huge impact on grain pricing levels." Soyoil dropped 0.3% at 54.95 cents per pound, as traders took profits, removing some support for soybeans. Soyoil is used to make biodiesel, and is therefore influenced by oil prices.
These rose on Tuesday on rising disruptions from the Iran-Israel conflict, although major oil and gas infrastructure and flows have so far been spared from any substantial impact. The oilseed also continues to face headwinds from weak demand, tariff uncertainty and global competition. Corn slipped 0.06% to $4.35 a bushel, pressured by beneficial weekend rains across key growing regions, including parts of the Plains and the northwest and southeastern Midwest. However, strong export data helped curb losses. U.S. corn inspections in the latest week reached about 1.67 million metric tons, at the high end of trade expectations.
Weekly condition ratings for the country's corn crop also improved and were tied for the highest for this time of the season in several years, according to U.S. government data. Soybean ratings declined. rose 0.65% to $5.40 a bushel, though harvest pressure capped gains. The U.S. winter wheat harvest is expanding after a slow start. The USDA said the winter wheat crop was 10% harvested, up from 4% a week ago but behind the five-year average of 16%. Analysts on average had estimated harvest progress at 11%. In France , the farm ministry on Tuesday forecast a strong rebound of the country's 2025 winter barley and rapeseed production from rain-hit crops last season. Commodity funds were net buyers of Chicago Board of Trade soyoil futures contracts on Monday and net sellers of corn, soymeal, wheat and soybean futures, traders said.
Prices at 1145 GMT Last Change Pct Move CBOT wheat 540.00 3.50 0.65 CBOT corn 435.00 0.25 0.06 CBOT soy 1069.75 0.00 0.00 Paris wheat 199.75 -0.50 -0.25 Paris maize 185.75 0.25 0.13 Paris rapeseed 490.00 1.00 0.20 Euro/dlr 1.16 0.00 0.03 Most active contracts - Wheat, corn and soy US cents/bushel, Paris futures in euros per tonne
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

New York appeals court throws out $464m civil fraud penalty against Donald Trump
New York appeals court throws out $464m civil fraud penalty against Donald Trump

The National

time6 hours ago

  • The National

New York appeals court throws out $464m civil fraud penalty against Donald Trump

A US court on Thursday threw out a $464 million civil penalty against President Donald Trump imposed by a judge who found he fraudulently inflated his personal worth, calling the sum "excessive" but upholding the judgment against him. Five judges of the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court said the fine "violates the Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution", which prohibits excessive or cruel punishments and penalties. The panel was sharply divided, issuing 323 pages of concurring and dissenting opinions with no majority. Rather, some judges endorsed parts of their colleagues' findings while denouncing others, enabling the court to rule. Judge Arthur Engoron ruled against Mr Trump in February last year at the height of his campaign to retake the White House, which coincided with several active criminal prosecutions that the Republican slammed as "lawfare". Mr Trump celebrated the Thursday decision, calling the case a "political witch hunt". "A great win for America," he wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform. In a subsequent post, he wrote: "This was a Case of Election Interference by the City and State trying to show, illegally, that I did things that were wrong when, in fact, everything I did was absolutely correct and, even, perfect." When Mr Engoron originally ruled against Mr Trump, he ordered the mogul-turned-politician to pay $464 million, including interest, while his sons Eric and Don Jr were told to hand over more than $4 million each. The judge found that Mr Trump and his company had unlawfully inflated his wealth and manipulated the value of properties to obtain favourable bank loans or insurance terms. Mr Engoron's other punishments, upheld by the appeals court, have been on pause during Mr Trump's appeal, and the President was able to hold off collection of the money by posting a $175 million bond. Alongside the financial hit to Mr Trump, the judge also banned him from running businesses for three years, which the President repeatedly referred to as a "corporate death penalty". State Attorney General Letitia James, who brought the initial case, can now appeal to the state's highest court, the New York Court of Appeals. 'Plainly, her ultimate goal was not 'market hygiene' ... but political hygiene, ending with the derailment of President Trump's political career and the destruction of his real estate business," one of the judges, appointed by a Republican governor to the bench, wrote. "The voters have obviously rendered a verdict on his political career. This bench today unanimously derails the effort to destroy his business.' The civil fraud case was just one of several legal obstacles for Mr Trump as he campaigned, won and segued to a second term as president. On January 10, he was sentenced in his criminal hush-money case to what's known as an unconditional discharge, leaving his conviction on the books but sparing him jail, probation, a fine or other punishment. He is appealing the conviction. And in December, a federal appeals court upheld a jury's finding that Mr Trump sexually abused writer E Jean Carroll in the mid-1990s and later defamed her, affirming a $5 million judgment against him. The appeals court declined in June to reconsider. Mr Trump still can try to get the Supreme Court to hear his appeal. The President is also appealing a subsequent verdict that requires him to pay Ms Carroll $83.3 million for additional defamation claims.

Fed's expansive experiment in strategy to get a reboot at Jackson Hole
Fed's expansive experiment in strategy to get a reboot at Jackson Hole

Zawya

time13 hours ago

  • Zawya

Fed's expansive experiment in strategy to get a reboot at Jackson Hole

The U.S. Federal Reserve's pivot toward the labor market in 2020 will get a reboot on Friday when Fed Chair Jerome Powell is expected to release a new framework for the central bank that accounts for a half-decade in which inflation surged, jobs were plentiful, and uncertainty became the watchword. The new document may not completely discard the language rolled out when the Fed, in the midst of the pandemic and a burgeoning social justice movement, pledged not to short-circuit labor market gains on the mere threat of inflation in hopes of achieving "broad-based and inclusive" levels of employment. But Powell has flagged that a recalibration is coming, potentially emphasizing stable inflation as a foundation for the best labor market results, and relegating some ideas to times when the economy is abnormally weak or inflation is abnormally low, as occurred in the decade before the pandemic. In those years, as the Fed organized a nationwide series of community listening tours, staffers would ask about inflation and "people would look at us like we had two heads. It was not the topic" when employment and growth concerns were more paramount, said Duke University professor Ellen Meade, who helped organize the 2020 framework review as a top Fed adviser. "The world looks very different today." Powell has already acknowledged that the language adopted in 2020 had been overtaken by the surge of inflation during the COVID-19 pandemic and was likely on its way out. He is expected to detail the new strategy document when he addresses an annual Fed research conference on Friday. Minutes of the Fed's July 29-30 meeting released on Wednesday said the committee was close to finalizing changes to its statement of principles and reiterated that it "would be designed to be robust across a wide range of economic conditions." The current approach has been criticized for introducing complexities that may have slowed the Fed's response to emerging inflation in 2021 and proved irrelevant to how the economy evolved during the pandemic. Much of what was introduced in 2020, especially a controversial promise to allow periods of high inflation to offset low ones so it averages 2% over time, grew out of the Fed's experience trying to lift interest rates from near-zero where they had been mired after the 2007-to-2009 recession. That approach may remain appropriate during prolonged economic weakness, said former Fed Vice Chair Richard Clarida, who helped oversee the last framework revisions. But the approach for normal times may revert to the more straightforward inflation-targeting the Fed previously used. "A verbatim reading of the 2020 statement holds up pretty well operating in the environment the Fed had been operating in for a dozen years. Inflation below target. Secular stagnation," said Clarida, now global economic adviser for Pimco. But "2025 is not 2020. We have policy space." The Fed's current benchmark rate is set between 4.25% and 4.50%, but had been a full percentage point higher last year, a level more in line with prior decades. From around March 2008 to September 2022 it was never above 2.5%. RETHINKING TRADEOFFS The challenge for Powell and the Fed now will be to avoid the appearance of giving up on the labor market in favor of an inflation-first approach. The job market recovered slowly from the 2007-to-2009 crisis, but the unemployment rate eventually fell well below the level Fed officials regard as consistent with stable inflation. Yet inflation remained tame, sparking a small revolution in thinking. Rather than seeing an inevitable tradeoff between inflation and jobs, policymakers decided they no longer needed to view a low unemployment rate as a sign of inflation to come. Job gains could continue until there were more obvious signs of rising prices. As the pandemic threw millions out of work, Powell at the Jackson Hole forum in 2020 spoke about the Fed's "appreciation for the benefits of a strong labor market, particularly for many in low- and moderate-income communities," and described a new strategy that "reflects our view that a robust job market can be sustained without causing an outbreak of inflation." The approach added to an emerging Republican critique of a "woke" Fed that downgraded price control to address income inequality. But it also was true to what the data suggested in the 2010s, and again more recently when the unemployment rate fell to very low levels even as inflation declined, defying many mainstream economists' predictions that high unemployment would be needed to lower inflation from its peak in 2022. Though the Fed's two congressionally mandated goals of stable inflation and maximum employment are considered equally important, Powell has begun using a formulation in which stable inflation is described as necessary for the job market to reach its potential - an approach that would let the Fed justify steps to fight inflation as still consistent with its employment goals. "Without price stability, we cannot achieve the long periods of strong labor market conditions that benefit all Americans," Powell said at the press conference following the Fed's July meeting. Meade said that harkens back to an approach former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan used to try to balance the two sometimes conflicting priorities, even if the understanding of how low unemployment does or does not influence inflation has changed. "You achieve price stability and that lays the groundwork for maximum employment...I do think Powell found his way back to that framing," Meade said. "You have to get to price stability first and that is in the front part of their brains." (Reporting by Howard Schneider; Editing by Dan Burns and Andrea Ricci)

Wall St futures slip ahead of Walmart's results, Fed meet
Wall St futures slip ahead of Walmart's results, Fed meet

Zawya

time13 hours ago

  • Zawya

Wall St futures slip ahead of Walmart's results, Fed meet

U.S. stock index futures slipped on Thursday, as investors stepped to the sidelines and awaited an earnings report from big-box retailer Walmart and clues on the Federal Reserve's next policy move from a three-day conference in Jackson Hole. A sharp decline in technology stocks such as Nvidia, AMD, Palantir and Meta earlier this week signaled investor fears that the stocks, which have soared since April lows, are now overvalued, while Washington's growing interference in the sector has also raised alarms. The selloff could also be a result of investors paring back their stock exposure during a traditionally rocky period for equities, according to the Stock Trader's Almanac. "Equities could be more at risk of volatility amid this week's selloff in AI-related stocks on the back of renewed doubts about AI valuations," said Raffi Boyadjian, lead market analyst at brokerage XM. "Although dip buyers have stepped in to stabilize the market, it's too early to rule out a further slump in mega-cap tech stocks." In premarket trading, Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and Palantir were marginally up, while Meta was flat. The market focus is now on Walmart's results, expected before the bell. Its shares were down 1.3%. Investors expect the major retailer to strike a cautious tone on customer demand as the labor market cools and inflation ticks up. Reports from other retailers such as Target and Home Depot earlier this week painted a mixed picture, and now investors are trying to gauge how U.S. tariffs would impact holiday sales later this year. At 05:43 a.m. ET, Dow E-minis were down 110 points, or 0.24%, S&P 500 E-minis were down 6.25 points, or 0.10% and Nasdaq 100 E-minis were down 5.25 points, or 0.02% The Fed's annual symposium is expected to kick off on Thursday, with Powell scheduled to speak on Friday at 10 a.m. ET. Traders are looking for any commentary from Chair Jerome Powell that would signal an interest rate cut in September following recent job market weakness. Minutes from the central bank's July meeting showed on Wednesday that policymakers had struck a cautious tone and expect the current interest rates to be not far above the neutral level - where economic activity is neither stimulated nor constrained. That led traders to pare back odds of a 25-basis-point interest rate cut in September to 79% from 99.9% last week, according to data compiled by LSEG. A weekly report on jobless claims, a private report on business activity and remarks from Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic, are also expected on Thursday. Among other market movers, Coty slumped 22% after the beauty products maker forecast a drop in current-quarter sales on weak U.S. spending. CoreWeave rose 1.7% after trading firm Jane Street Group reported it has a 5.4% passive stake in the Nvidia-backed company. (Reporting by Johann M Cherian; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli)

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store