The Morning Vibe

18/11/11 -- The overnight Globex market is a bit firmer after last night's steep losses, London and Paris wheat are lower still trying to catch up with what happened in Chicago yesterday.

The Telegraph report that Asian investors are now selling German bonds as they gear up to pull their money out of Europe completely. If bunds aren't good enough for them then they certainly don't want Spanish, Italian or even French debt. The "exodus marks a dangerous inflexion point in the unfolding drama," they say. I agree, this thing is starting to accelerate out of control.

Eurozone jitters haven't turned to panic yet, but we might not be far off. Spain holds a general election on Sunday having just having had to pay the highest yields on ten year bonds in 15 years yesterday, a smidgen under the 7% level deemed unsustainable.

Russia's harvest stood at 96 MMT as of Nov 1st off 93% of the planted area, according to Rosstat. The corn harvest was 60% done as of that date, they add.

Reuters report the Russian wheat harvest at 59.4 MMT as of Nov 16th. They don't say whether that is is clean or bunker weight, the latter I assume, making the clean weight total likely to be around 56.5-57.0 MMT.

The corn harvest in Ukraine is 88% complete producing a crop of 19 MMT so far, according to the Ministry there.

After a couple of weeks of promising numbers Brussels only issued export licences for 241,000 MT this week bringing the year to date total to 5.8 MMT, 37% down on this point last season.

There's intense competition developing for what export business is around and the EU and US are certainly closer to the back of the queue than the front.