Bloomberg:
- Lehman Brothers(LEH) may report its first quarterly loss since going public in 1994, increasing pressure on the company to raise more capital, according to analysts.
- Intercontinental Exchange Inc.(ICE) agreed to buy Creditex Group for $625 million in a deal it says will help to improve processing in the market for credit derivatives.
- Banks in Europe are lagging behind US lenders in disclosing risk, damaging investor confidence, according to Svein Andresen, secretary general of the Financial Stability Forum.
- The US dollar rose to a two-week high against the euro and increased versus the yen after Fed Chairman Bernanke said the central bank is “attentive” to the implications of the currency’s decline. ``It could be a turning point for the dollar,'' said Michael Woolfolk, senior currency strategist in New York at Bank of New York Mellon, the world's largest custodial bank, with more than $20 trillion in assets under administration. ``It's very unusual for a sitting Fed chairman to talk about the dollar explicitly.''
- North Dakota Oil Fields of Saudi-Sized Reserves Make Farmers Oil Drillers.
- Crude oil is falling more than $3/bbl. on signs that the US will stop cutting interest rates to bolster the US dollar and worries over a potential bursting of the oil bubble intensified.
- Copper fell for a second session on speculation that consumption may cool in China, the world’s biggest user of the metal. Stockpiles of the metal monitored by the Shanghai Futures Exchange have surged 85% this year.
- Corn fell for the first time in three sessions on speculation that a government investigation of US futures trading may result in rule changes that will halt the surge in commodity investment. ``The investigation into the commodity index-fund investments is going to reduce buying interest today,'' said Don Roose, president of U.S. Commodities Inc. in West Des Moines, Iowa. ``Commodities have been dominated by increased index-fund buying that might be at risk.''
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- Ford Motor(F) said May sales fell 16% as gasoline near $4 a gallon steered US consumers from pickups and sport-utility vehicles.
NY Times:
- Regulators of the nation’s commodity markets will demand more information about investors to determine whether they are evading market limits on speculation and artificially driving up world food prices. Billions of dollars have poured into the commodity futures market – from pension funds, endowments and a host of other institutional investors – through the new conduit of commodity index funds. They believe this flood of new money from swaps and index funds is undermining confidence in the market’s role in setting prices and managing risk. The commission will start requiring more information about index funds and, more significantly, about the clients on the other side of the unregulated swaps deals that are being hedged on the regulated futures exchanges. The swaps market has traditionally been seen as off limits for federal commodity regulators, but the commission clearly is responding to concern that investors may be using swaps dealers to evade rules that limit the size of their speculative role in regulated markets. The commission is also putting brakes on granting waivers that have exempted some commodity index funds from speculative limits. In recent years, more than a dozen commodity index fund companies have been granted individual waivers.
- Putin Critics Disappear From Television, Talk Shows.
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AP:
- AP tally: Obama clinches Democratic nomination.