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The Trump administration weighed in on the side of Bayer as the chemical maker attempted to persuade the Supreme Court to review its case regarding Roundup herbicide.
Shares of Bayer ended with a gain of more than 12% in Frankfurt Tuesday after U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer appeared to side with the company in an opinion. He wrote that the Environmental Protection Agency has “repeatedly determined that glyphosphate is not likely to be carcinogenic in humans, and the agency has repeatedly approved Roundup labels that did not contain cancer warnings,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Sauer wrote that a manufacturer shouldn’t be “left subject to ‘50 different labeling regimes prescribing’ different requirements.”
The report noted that lawsuits alleging a tie between glyphosate and cancer have been an issue for Bayer since its 2018 acquisition of Monsanto, which developed Roundup. Bayer inherited thousands of lawsuits after it completed the $63 billion deal, with a San Francisco jury holding the company responsible for a case of non-Hodgkin lymphoma shortly after the acquisition closed. Bayer has set aside billions of dollars to cover potential settlements for 67,000 remaining and future cases, the report said.
Bayer welcomed the Solicitor General’s opinion. “The support of the U.S. government is an important step and good news for U.S. farmers, who need regulatory clarity,” Bayer Chief Executive Bill Anderson said in a statement.
Dollar weakness explained
Want to know why the dollar is so weak? Look at government bond yields, particularly for the U.S. relative to the rest of the world.
A weaker U.S. dollar – all things equal – is considered a positive for commodities priced in the unit. After all, it makes those commodities cheaper to foreign buyers. The dollar has been notably weak in 2025 and that has been seen as a factor in robust U.S. corn and wheat exports and perhaps a cushion for soybean sales given China’s until-recent absence.
The dollar has dropped versus major rivals, losing around 12% versus the euro this year, while the ICE U.S. Dollar Index, a measure of the currency against a basket of six major rivals, is down over 8% year to date.
Now note that the U.S. has seen the yield on the 10-year Treasury note fall by nearly half a percentage point this year (yields and prices move opposite each other). That’s unique, observed Nicholas Colas, co-founder of DataTrek Research, in a Tuesday note. No other major sovereign debt issuer has seen such a decline, he noted, with the average international long-term government debt yield instead rising by 20 basis points so far in 2025.
Japanese government bond yields are up the most in 2025, rising 79 basis points though the yield remains quite low at 1.85%. German government bond yields have risen as the country’s government shook off its longstanding distaste for deficit spending.
Higher yields outside the U.S. go a long way to explaining why the dollar has weakened this year, especially against the euro, Colas wrote, observing that declining yields are pretty much a U.S.-only phenomenon. It’s also a notable one given worries earlier this year that deficit spending and other inflationary pressures would lift yields.
Those fears have, at least so far, been misplaced, he noted.