Barriers are Good The issue de jour is tariffs. Donald Trump is vilified by conventionalists for the self-induced wound of raising this single barrier to business. As a businessman, Trump sees a complex web of market barriers. Domestic regulations, domestic taxes, but also foreign tariffs (taxes) and foreign regulations. The legacy media criticizes his efforts to reduce domestic regulations and taxes because of their contended adverse impact on social goals, but it also vilifies his effort to reduce the adverse impact of foreign taxes and regulations on America’s international imbalances. So, barriers by other countries are okay, and do not reduce U.S. domestic constraints on business. There is a consistency, barriers are good. &...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. and Chinese officials are expected to discuss agriculture and non-tariff trade barriers ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington later this month, potentially opening the door to additional U.S. agricultural purchases or improved marke...
The U.S. will observe Labor Day on Monday, 7 September. U.S. markets and the WPI office will be closed that day. The next edition of Ag Perspectives will be published Tuesday, 8 September...
Key Takeaways: Drought and changes to the multi-year trend in cow slaughter and retention have the potential to dramatically alter beef trim supplies and pricing, and WPI specifically models three different drought scenarios for fall 2026. Based on our models, WPI expects 90 percent lean...
From WPI Consulting
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.