Highlights
Late yesterday, the Manhattan District Attorney asked for a meeting with law enforcement officials ahead of a possible indictment of Donald Trump. The DA said he is planning to have Donald Trump handcuffed and arrested next week over hush money Trump’s attorney paid to Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet in 2016. What this event would do to commodity prices is probably bearish short term and then bullish after a week or so. Hopefully, the nation does not have to go through this highly disruptive event.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) of war crimes has issued an arrest warrant for President Putin for war crimes of deportation of children from Ukrainian occupied territories into the Russian Federation. International law prohibits occupying powers from transferring civilians from occupied areas to other territories. Dozens of countries are not ICC members, including China, India, Russia, and the United States.
The Ukraine Export Agreement expires today. Late yesterday, Reuters News Service reported that Russian spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, "Russia is renewing the deal for 60 days." Alessandra Vellucci, the Director of the UN Information Service, told Reuters the agreement is expected to be renewed for 120 days and the discussions are ongoing.
Soybeans had a bad week and a worse Friday as Brazil harvests its huge bean crop with no place to store, or trucks, barges, or trains to load and not nearly enough infrastructure to get the beans to the ports and even less ship loading capacity. With storage rates at 25¢ per bushel per month and the soybean basis crashing has Brazilian beans dirt cheap compared to US beans. Spec futures traders were selling beans the past few days. The problem for a bean importer, who wants to take advantage of the super cheap beans in Brazil, has to wait two months to possibly get a ship in place to load the beans and another month for the ship to sail across an ocean. This low-priced situation will increase export demand for more expensive US beans very soon just like Brazil’s rain delayed harvest in January and February did.