Corn climbs to 2-week high; soybeans, wheat firm
Wheat slid on harvest pressure and positioning ahead of the US Independence Day holiday weekend. Markets will be closed on Friday.
'US weather is pretty normal for corn and we have (a) big supply coming from Brazil,' said one broker of agricultural commodities.
'Prices are going to remain under pressure but a lot of news on the supply front has already been factored into the market and there is likely to be some buying interest at these levels.'
The most-active corn contract on the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) rose 0.9% to $4.37-1/4 a bushel as of 0307 GMT, after hitting its highest since June 16 earlier in the session.
Soybeans fell 0.1% to $10.47-1/4 a bushel and wheat lost 0.1% to 5.63-1/4 a bushel.
Largely favourable crop development weather had dragged corn and soybean prices to multi-month lows in recent sessions as warm temperatures and timely rains boosted US harvest prospects.
The optimal conditions coincide with harvesting by rival exporter Brazil of what some analysts expect to be a record second-corn crop.
Corn stuck near lows on supply pressure
Abundant supplies are hanging over the wheat market, with US farmers progressing with their harvests, while crops in Europe and the Black Sea region are expected to be sizeable despite harsh weather, including a heatwave in western Europe this week.
Dry weather in southern Ukraine during sowing and plant growth stages has significantly reduced winter wheat and barley yields, scientists at the Ukrainian National Academy of Agrarian Sciences said on Wednesday.
Commodity funds were net buyers of CBOT corn, wheat, soybean and soyoil futures contracts on Wednesday and net sellers of soymeal, traders said.
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Express Tribune
8 hours ago
- Express Tribune
The big cruel ‘beauty' of Trump's bill
In a cruel twist of irony, America's Independence Day is being celebrated with the largest upward transfer of wealth in the country's history. By signing the so-called 'Big Beautiful Bill' into law on July 4, President Donald Trump has turned Robin Hood into a bogeyman – and made the rich the rightful folk heroes. With the sweeping tax-and-spending package, Trump has unleashed a legislative juggernaut that brings Karl Marx's warning into brutal focus: 'Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery at the opposite pole.' The bill robs the bottom 90 per cent of Americans of around $700 per household, while funnelling over $6,000 into the pockets of the wealthiest fifth, engineering misery on an industrial scale. With Yale's Budget Lab and the Congressional Budget Office projecting a $3.4 trillion hole in the federal budget over the next decade – before counting interest – it is an ideological project in plutocratic redistribution. In a staged heist against the social safety net, Medicaid, SNAP, clean energy credits and even lifesaving foreign aid are set to become collateral damage in a grand design to enrich the few and abandon the rest. It is a dagger at the heart of America's social contract. Or, in Bernie Sanders' remarks on the floor of the Senate: 'It is the most dangerous piece of legislation in the modern history of our country.' 'It is a gift to the billionaire class, while causing massive pain for low-income and working-class Americans. Actually though, M. President, I'm wrong. This is not a gift to the billionaire class. They paid for it,' he quipped. In Arkansas alone, more than 100,000 people stand to lose their Medicaid coverage. Food stamp recipients will now face stiffer work requirements, a bitter irony at a time when grocery bills are soaring and rural job markets remain fragile. Across the country, the implications are chilling. Already struggling rural hospitals may face accelerated shutdowns. Families living paycheck to paycheck will be squeezed even harder. At the same time, tax cuts for billionaires are made permanent, fossil fuel subsidies are revived with a vengeance and the deficit balloons by an additional $3.5 trillion. Who wins and who loses? Independent analyses from the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) show that the bill will kick 16 million people off their health insurance, gut nutrition programmes and make college even harder to afford — all to bankroll massive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. The bill adds a whopping $3 trillion to the national debt, setting the stage for long-term economic drag and a grim inheritance for younger generations. Households making under $23,000 will lose around $1,600 annually, mostly from Medicaid and SNAP cuts, nearly 4% of their total income. Families earning under $55,000 a year will see a net loss in resources. Meanwhile, the middle class gets table scraps, a meagre 0.5–0.8% gain, barely enough to offset rising living costs. At the top, it's raining gold. Households making over $700,000 will gain $12,000 a year, not counting estate tax windfalls. Meanwhile, the top 10% rake in 68% of the bill's total benefits. Those earning over $500,000 will receive a $168 billion tax cut in 2027 alone while people making over $1 million will see a $93.6 billion tax windfall that same year. For the lowest earners, the pain is twofold: many will actually see tax increases, with those making less than $15,000 a year facing a 12% hike in 2027, ballooning to 73% by 2033 once temporary credits expire. Even crueller than the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the grandly-titled bill doles out nearly double the tax break to millionaires while stripping aid from those who need it most. In fact, TCJA at least gave modest cuts to low-income earners, but the "beauty" of Trump's latest attack lies in its spectacular theft. Generational theft The long-term hit is generational. Penn Wharton's model finds that a 40-year-old median-income earner will lose $7,500 over a lifetime under the bill. However, a 70-year-old with the same income will be $17,500 richer. In other words, the American Dream has been restructured into a senior savings plan, just hang in there till retirement and hope capitalism does not kill you first. For the young, the pursuit of happiness now comes with a warning label: not applicable during your lifetime. In a nutshell, the bill is a ledger of who matters and who does not in Trump's America. The arithmetic is brutally simple: if you're a CEO, hedge fund manager or a defence contractor, your stock just went up. However, if you are a working-class parent, a disabled veteran, a retiree or a single mother in rural Arkansas, you're collateral damage in a cynical calculation. While older, higher-income Americans stand to gain in the short term through generous tax breaks, younger workers and future generations are left footing the bill, both figuratively and literally. Because younger earners are typically in lower tax brackets, they benefit the least from income tax cuts. At the same time, they are disproportionately exposed to deep cuts in Medicaid and student aid — two critical lifelines for young families and students. Medicaid now covers four in ten hospital births in the US, meaning today's cuts are tomorrow's childhood health crises. As Jessica Riedl of the conservative Manhattan Institute puts it, even from the right: 'In the short term, the benefits are certainly tilted towards higher earners, which is often a good proxy for age.' However, the heaviest blow comes in the form of long-term debt. The bill adds $3 trillion to the national debt, which economists predict will push interest rates higher and eat away at future federal budgets, squeezing out investment in education, infrastructure and social services. 'There is an obvious intergenerational transfer here,' says John Ricco of the Yale Budget Lab, which estimates that by 2055, when today's newborns turn 30, the average annual mortgage will cost $4,000 more because of the bill's impact on interest rates. 'Making America white again' Moreover, the bill's border provisions read like the fevered dreams of a security‑state lobbyist. ICE's budget balloons by an order of magnitude, rippling from roughly $10 billion today to over $100 billion in a few short years. Funding for walls, detention facilities and mass deportations soars, reflecting a dark fusion of nationalist spectacle and capitalist discipline. Immigrants, refugees and asylum‑seekers become pawns in a broader project of social control, as the state draws lines in sand and steel across its own land. The Pentagon budget is padded by another $150 billion, ICE gets tens of billions for deportations and even a private border-enforcement army and massive wall project are shoehorned in. In short, if $1 is cut from Medicaid, $1.50 flies to police and walls. As Washington Monthly notes, the bill 'lavishes funding on ICE to raise a private army and set up detention camps'. The movement 'is primarily about… 'owning the libs,' 'Making America White Again,' and cruelty against the marginalised'. Public opinion polls tell the rest of the story: close to half of Americans – 49 per cent – oppose the Big Beautiful Bill, while only 29 per cent support it. Even within Republican ranks, fiscal hawks and swing‑district representatives bristled at the eye‑popping deficits and social carnage baked into the legislation. Three‑headed hydra of class warfare From a leftist vantage point, the Big Beautiful Bill is a three‑headed hydra of class warfare, eco‑fascism and bio‑political abandonment. It rebrands austerity as patriotism, casting the poor as 'undeserving' parasites even as it showers the wealthy with boons. By shredding Medicaid, SNAP, and foreign‑aid programs, lawmakers legislate life‑and‑death outcomes for the poor, the elderly, children abroad and immunocompromised Americans alike. Green betrayal Climate leftists see the bill as an eco‑fascist manifesto: a blueprint for resource control through environmental destruction, with the state's coercive machinery gearing up to enforce a fossil‑fuel future at gunpoint. Perhaps the ugliest manifestation of the 'beautiful bill' is in its astonishing show of capitalism's climate death drive, an embrace of catastrophe for private profit, where planetary care is too high a price to pay. The bill's architects also saw fit to annihilate the scaffolding of the clean‑energy transition. With the stroke of a pen, the EV tax credit that buoyed nascent electric‑vehicle markets vanishes, wind and solar developers find their pipeline choked off and carbon‑capture investments are relegated to the dustbin. Environmental finance specialists forecast the loss of up to 250,000 clean‑energy jobs, even as household electricity bills spike by double digits. In effect, the legislation slams on the brakes of climate progress while flooring the accelerator on fossil‑fuel extraction – an eco‑dead end if there ever was one. The bill quietly scraps much of the Biden administration's clean-energy agenda. Solar and wind tax credits are repealed, even as fossil fuel subsidies persist. Analysts warn that by punishing solar and wind generation the law will devastate energy grids in red states like Texas. The bill is an eco-political undoing: the countryside continues to flood and burn while lawmakers dismantle the very buffers — renewables, efficiency programs and green jobs – that could soften the blow. Instead of weaning us off coal and oil, Congress doubles down on drilling and emissions, casting our children as future sacrifices. The irony is cruel: at a moment of record wildfires and hurricanes, politicians fetishize fossil fuel profits. By design, the working forests and windmills of tomorrow become victims to drive short-term windfall. The bill's very 'beauty' is in its ritualised cruelty. It taps into a perverse collective glee, inviting supporters to revel in the punishment of the 'lazy' and 'undeserving,' all while the architects of the legislation themselves benefit. The broader lesson is clear: the Big Beautiful Bill is the Empire striking back (internally, on its own unwanted), wielding fiscal hammers and regulatory scalpel alike to carve out a new world order – one where the poor are expendable, the planet dispensable and the state an instrument of predatory elites. It is a monstrous legislative conflation of class warfare, climate sabotage and state violence – an apex of neoliberal authoritarianism.
Business Recorder
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- Business Recorder
Gold prices rebound on dollar weakness
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Business Recorder
17 hours ago
- Business Recorder
Malaysian palm oil drifts lower
KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysian palm oil futures closed lower on Friday, weighed by weaker rival edible oils at the Chicago and Dalian markets and by profit booking, though the contract still managed to post its seventh weekly gain in eight. The benchmark palm oil contract for September delivery on the Bursa Malaysia Derivatives Exchange slid 29 ringgit, or 0.71%, to 4,062 ringgit ($963.02) a metric ton at the close. The contract rose 1.27% this week. Crude palm oil prices were lower, tracking weakness in soybean oil and Dalian palm olein prices, said David Ng, a proprietary trader at Kuala Lumpur-based trading firm Iceberg X Sdn Bhd. 'Profit-taking activities after the recent price rally also affected the market,' he added. Dalian's most-active soyoil contract fell 0.95%, while its palm oil contract shed 0.07%. Soyoil prices on the Chicago Board of Trade lost 0.96%. Palm oil tracks the price movements of rival edible oils as it competes for a share of the global vegetable oils market. Oil futures fell slightly after Iran reaffirmed its commitment to nuclear non-proliferation, while major producers from the OPEC+ group are set to agree to raise their output this weekend. Weaker crude oil futures make palm a less attractive option for biodiesel feedstock. The ringgit, palm's currency of trade, strengthened 0.05% against the dollar, making the commodity slightly expensive for buyers holding foreign currencies. Malaysia's palm oil inventories likely dropped for the first time in four months in June as production fell unexpectedly while export demand remained robust for the tropical oil, a Reuters survey showed.
