Hey Snackers,
Seven masked thieves pulled off an audacious heist at Tuscan warehouse, expertly disabling the alarm system before carting away 30,000 bottles of rare wine, the Financial Times reports. The wine, made by family owned Marchesi Antinori, which traces its history back to 1385, sell from between about $170 and $560 a bottle.
The thieves seemed to have intimate knowledge of the specialized storage facility’s operations, with the robbery timed just before Antinori was about to send out consignment shipments to some of its best customers, ensuring the warehouse would be laden with valuable bottles.
It’s the most recent in a string of thefts in Italy targeting high-end wine in storage or at restaurant cellars. Antinori says it went public with the sale in the hope that enterprising oenophiles can be on the lookout for the looted bottles.
Stocks were relatively flat on Monday.
Another attempt to get diesel prices down appears to have fallen apart
When we last checked in on the White House’s attempts to get the price of diesel down, the President was floating the idea of allowing red dye diesel – which is chemically identical to normal diesel but with added red dye and is exempt from federal taxes but restricted to off-road vehicles – to be used for to be used for normal on-road uses.
Energy experts doubted the policy change would do much to push prices downward, and would likely result in red dye diesel becoming more expensive, putting even greater cost pressure on farmers.
Now, the White House is trying a different approach: get Russia back into the (legal) petroleum products exports business. On Friday, the Trump administration announced that the US will buy 36 million barrels of Russian diesel over the next several months, with 2.25 million barrels purchased immediately.
Prices did initially tick down on the news, but the challenge is the context: the world uses around 30 million barrels of diesel per day. US truckers use almost 3 million barrels of diesel a day, Reuters reports.
The news agency pointed out that the shipments of Russian diesel that the US has announced a schedule for thus far amount to less than four days of what US trucks use daily. The Financial Times noted that industry analysts expected the deal to have very little impact on global supplies and thus prices.
President Trump went further on Sunday evening, announcing a so-called energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine in which both nations would abstain from attacking energy infrastructure. Shortly after the announcement, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia carried out a target strike in violation of the ceasefire. Both the international and US benchmarks for crude oil prices rose a little over 2% on Monday.
The Takeaway
Attempting to use Russian imports to drive down diesel prices is a tenuous tactic given the scale of the shipments announced thus far, and, as Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid told the FT, the uncertainty of any truce between the Kremlin and Ukraine.
But as long as diesel prices stay elevated, expect more policy activity from the White House. “There is a lot of impetus to do more,” Citigroup’s head of energy strategy Anthony Yuen pointed out, because GOP districts “tend to consume more diesel”.
That’s how much Albertsons is demanding that Kroger pay in compensation for the failed deal to combine the two companies in what would have been the biggest grocery deal in history.
What else we’re Snackin’
Meta rolls out latest AI model in effort to create new source of subscription revenue
Fannie and Freddie are changing how the score credit-worthiness
Delta delays debut of Saudi Arabia service until March after Riyadh airport attacks
European consumers love cheap Chinese EVs; European policy makers less so
Tuesday
Earnings from JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Citi, and Wells Fargo slated for release ahead of the open.