Good afternoon and welcome to Markets Desk.
Wheat markets are under pressure today after the USDA delivered a bearish stocks report, sending Chicago soft red winter contracts down twenty to twenty-one cents, with Kansas City hard red winter falling a similar amount. The agency's decision to raise supply estimates knocked the legs out from under a complex that had been searching for bullish catalysts.
Shifting to energy policy, President Trump has struck a deal with Vladimir Putin to route Russian diesel into American and global markets. With refinery capacity still constrained by damage from conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, the administration had limited tools to push pump prices lower. This agreement represents one of the more unconventional levers pulled so far on the energy front.
And on the tech side, Google is preparing to release its Gemini four model publicly under the codename Argon, but employees inside the company are already testing a more advanced internal build called Carbon. Some staffers are comparing Carbon favorably to Anthropic's Opus five point five, suggesting Alphabet's AI pipeline runs considerably deeper than what consumers are about to see.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
