FICC | Commodities

Special Report

The risk of a “super El Niño” represents a meaningful threat to agricultural markets. Wheat, cocoa, and palm oil appear particularly vulnerable to El Niño-related supply disruptions. A rise in food prices could also generate political — and potentially geopolitical — reverberations across frontier and emerging markets, where food prices are far more relevant than in developed economies.

Copper prices are surging again after a brief pullback in the first quarter. What is driving the renewed strength, and can it persist?

Hopes for an imminent Middle East de-escalation have capped oil prices in recent weeks, but that restraint may soon fade.

The UAE’s exit from OPEC is unlikely to impact oil markets in 2026. Over the longer term, however, the emergence of an “anti-OPEC club” of producers favoring unconstrained oil output growth would create a headwind to crude prices and weaken the price floor that OPEC seeks to defend.

The Iran war has damaged LNG production capacity and halted tanker flows through the Strait of Hormuz. We assess the conflict's impact on LNG markets over cyclical and structural horizons.

Special Report

Uranium’s bull market remains intact, supported by structural supply deficits, rising nuclear demand, and tightening fuel-cycle constraints. The Iran war reinforces energy security concerns while disrupting key inputs like sulfur, exacerbating supply risks. With contracting strengthening and policy support accelerating, uranium is re-emerging as a strategic commodity with durable upside.

In this report, we deviate from our base case and instead assume that there is an immediate improvement in Hormuz traffic. This exercise allows us to explore how the global oil supply shortfall could eventually be offset if the right conditions are in place.

Special Report

The Iran war provides a timely motivation for examining how the main financial asset classes and commodity sectors perform across different inflation regimes and during periods of elevated geopolitical risk.

Over the past month, oil market participants have scrambled to fill the gap in global oil supply caused by the Strait of Hormuz’s closure. While these efforts have been impressive, the scale of the disruption means they are ultimately insufficient. Upside pressures will continue to dominate energy prices until transit through the Strait of Hormuz is restored.

WTI is relatively calm amid the current conflict in the Middle East. Markets are too complacent on US crude relative to other international benchmarks.