Quick Overview

• US producer prices fell 0.5% in June, signaling a slow economy.

• China's CPI, the country's key inflation gauge, rose 2.9% YoY, but fell 0.6% MoM. The decline from the previous month was mainly due to falling food prices.

• (RealtyTrac) US Banks took control of 269,962 properties in the second quarter, up 5 % from the prior quarter and a 38 % spike from the second quarter of last year -- Repossessions will likely top 1 million this year. From January through June one out of every 17 households in Nevada received a foreclosure notice.

• The Bank of Japan left rates unchanged but raised its economic forecast for the current fiscal year.

• Japan revised June machine tool orders up 139.5%.

• Novartis says Q2 profit up 19%

• Wheat contracts hit a seven-month high as 14 regions of the Russian federation declare a state of emergency, with 11 of them seeing half their sown land destroyed. The ongoing drought in Russia is reported to have "killed 52.3 percent of grain seedlings in the Ulyanovsk region," according to a news report by news agency TASS.
  
  
  
  Overnight weather models are warmer and drier for the Midwest

• (Reuters) - India's monsoon rains, vital for farm output gains after last year's drought, were 24 percent below normal in the past week and unlikely to rebound in the week ahead, the weather office said, raising fears of crop loss..

• Manufacturing in the Philadelphia region cooled to 5.1 this month as orders fell for the first time in a year, signaling the expansion is slowing.

• U.S. industrial output rose 0.1% in June.

• The number of people submitting unemployment insurance benefits fell to 429,000 last week, the lowest level since August 2008

• J.P. Morgan (JPM )said its second-quarter net profit rose 76%

• FG/Agro said Brazil’s’ main center-south is expected to crush 588 million metric tons of cane in the ongoing 2010-11 crop season. This compares to the earlier estimate in March of 595 million MT.

• (Reuters) Drought caused by a hot spell over the past month has hurt rice fields in central Vietnam, with nearly 100,000 hectares (247,100 acres) destroyed or partly destroyed, a state-run newspaper reported on Thursday.