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There’s a split among refiners as the Environmental Protection Agency faces a year-end target to finalize its plans to to reallocate biofuel blending volumes that were waived for small refineries under the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) and set RFS targets for 2026 and 2027, Inside EPA reported this week.
The report said big oil companies want reduced issuance of the waivers though both sides oppose a planned reallocation.
For its part, the biofuels industry has argued that only a full reallocation is allowed under the law.
End of shutdown may not help Fed
The shutdown of the federal government appears near its end, which means a deluge of long-delayed, top-tier economic data will begin hitting traders’ screens as early as next week. But that doesn’t mean Federal Reserve policymakers, who appear starkly divided over the prospect for another rate cut next month, will get the clarity they desire.
“We expect some of the September data due during the first couple of weeks of October soon,” wrote Nancy Vanden Houten, lead U.S. Economist at Oxford Economics, in a Wednesday note. The September jobs report could possibly be released next week, she said.
Other data, including retail sales, housing starts, personal income, and spending, might take a bit longer since the data collection process for those would have typically spilled over into the first part of October, she said.
“Even after the shutdown ends, the backlog of releases will continue to pile up. Based on past experience, it’s likely that the releases of some October and November data will be combined,” Vanden Houten said.
The data that will be released shortly after the shutdown ends will be backward-looking, and it won’t show how the economy fared during or immediately after the shutdown ended, she said. Given Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s hawkish comments following last month’s rate cut, the central bank is likely to pause in December, the economist wrote.
Moscow says 3% of harvest to come from Ukraine territories
Around 3% of Russia’s total grain harvest will come from what Moscow on Thursday called its “new territories” in Ukraine this year, Reuters reported. That matches last year’s figure despite a drought in that area and neighboring regions in the summer.
According to the report, Russian Agriculture Minister Oksana Lut said the regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhi, which are largely controlled by Russia, harvested around 4 million tons of grain, slightly below 2024, and around 600,000 tons of oilseeds from around 3 million hectares of land. The so-called new territories are still internationally recognized as Ukrainian, the report noted.