China Buys, but Trade Relationship 'Severely Damaged'

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

The USDA Report was supposed to be the headline in Friday’s trade. That turned out to not be the case. The report came out more or less as expected. Instead the story was China. We received both some bullish and some bearish news related to trade with China. Standard Grain’s Joe Vaclavik broke it down on his “Grain Markets and Other Stuff Podcast”.

Vaclavik… “President Trump made some comments at midday today that were not necessarily helpful to the market. President Trump said us and China trade relations are severely damaged; and that's just kind of rehashing what he had said previously over the last couple of months. So those comments were seen as being, maybe bearish the market. Now on that same note, We sold a lot of grain to China this morning. As a matter of fact, we had our biggest flash sale to China of corn since 1994 reported this morning, 1.365 million metric tons. That's about 54 million bushels of corn sold to China. It was split up between old crop and new crop. So that in itself you would think would be encouraging. We also sold soybeans. We also sold some HRW wheat and some spring wheat to China.”

Vaclavik reiterated that it will be near impossible for China to follow through with their phase one commitments, and now it sounds like a phase two is far from a guarantee.

In addition to monitoring this situation, we will be back to watching the weather closely this week.