If in doubt tweak China’s numbers, no one has the ability to prove you right or wrong. That seems to be the lesson out of the WASDE report last night.
The USDA increased Chinese wheat production from 128mt to 132.5mt. They also increased beginning stocks from 126.82mt to 131.26mt, they dropped Chinese imports by 500kt and increased domestic consumption by 1mt, waved the wand, said the magic words, “tariffs are great” and whollar, Chinese carryover stocks increased 7.45mt………not that that should make any difference to anyone other than the Chinese but apparently it does.
Other less than convincing data included a reduction in Australian production down to 17.5mt of wheat. They managed to increase carry in by 300kt though, don’t know where that was hiding, but domestic feed increases took care of that when they increased from 4.2mt to 5.0mt. This takes total domestic usage up to 8.5mt. There was a 1.5mt reduction in Aussie export projections bringing it down to 11.5mt, which is probably still 1.5mt too high. After the smoke cleared ending stocks remained at 3.35mt…..seriously ??
Argentine wheat data was left unchanged….Canadian data was left unchanged…..Russian data was left unchanged.
Basically the net result is world production at 733.51mt (730.92lm) and ending stocks at 266.71mt (260.18lm).
Even US exports were left unchanged in this report, I mean where do these data collectors live, under a rock.
Wheat markets are lower across the board.