The President Goes to War

Crop Prices Hit 3-Year High As Heat & War Stoke Supply Fears; Options Whale Places $20M Corn Bet The Bloomberg Agriculture Spot Index (BCOMAGSP) climbed to a three-year high Wednesday as widening conflict across critical energy and grain trade corridors, from the Black Sea to the Strait of Hormuz and the southern Red Sea, collided with scorching heat waves across Europe and the US and mounting El Niño risks in critical agri growing belts, reviving the threat of global food inflation. BCOMAGSP is a dollar-denominated benchmark that tracks 10 major agricultural...

"Late Spring Buyer Rush": US Pending Home Sales Just Surged By The Most In Almost 2 Years Pending home sales in the US were expected to rise for the fourth straight month in May and they did with a huge beat (+3.8% MoM vs +0.9% MoM exp - above the highest analysts estimate), which was slightly offset by a downward revision for April (from +1.4% to +0.3%). That is the best monthly improvement in pending home sales since Sept 2024 and that lifted sales by just over 2% YoY. “A late spring...

Putin To Escalate Ukraine War In Wake Of CIA Chief's Visit, Report Speculates Update1505ET: In the wake of yesterday's unusual visit by the Director of the CIA to Moscow for mystery 2-hour talks, Bloomberg says that President Putin is preparing for a major escalate against Ukraine: Russia is preparing to escalate attacks on Ukraine after concluding that negotiations for a peace deal have reached a dead end, according to three people close to the Kremlin. For now, Russia is weighing an intensification of powerful conventional ballistic missile attacks on Kyiv, including the...