Owen Li

The government's starting U.S. corn yield for 2023 has already raised eyebrows for being notably above the prior record, and that number is likely to come under further scrutiny on Friday given near-record dryness across the Corn Belt since planting.

Nickel has been the under-performer of the London Metal Exchange (LME) base metals pack this year.

China's crude oil and natural gas imports recovered strongly in May, which could help improve market sentiment. For copper, China's concentrate imports jumped to a fresh high, while unwrought copper imports remain soft.

Parts of the U.S. Corn Belt have been historically dry over the last month, pressuring both corn and soybean health and offering an early challenge to the government's record yield forecasts.

Australia's central bank on Tuesday raised interest rates by a quarter-point to an 11-year high, and warned that further tightening may be required to ensure that inflation returns to target.

Chicago-traded soybean futures last week closed below $13 per bushel for the first time in a year-and-a-half, though speculators are still hanging on to the net long position they have maintained since April 2020.

On the back of a weak first-quarter performance for the eurozone economy, we have downgraded our growth outlook. That said, we now pencil in two more rate hikes, as core inflation is unlikely to come down much before autumn.

Booming soybean demand from China early this century drove extensive crop expansion across the Americas, but while production is set to swell even further in top exporter Brazil, growth in Chinese imports has cooled.

U.S. oil and gas production continued to rise strongly in March - the delayed impact of very high prices that prevailed until the third quarter of 2022.

A run of weak economic data in China is likely to show up in softer imports of key commodities, albeit with a lag given the time taken to physically ship resources from around the globe.