Public Health President Xi Doubles Down on Zero-COVID, Port Cities Face Closures Heading into the 20th Party Congress, some observers were optimistically hoping for a pivot away from the central government’s zero-COVID strategy. Those ideas were quickly dashed during President Xi’s speech on Sunday, which kicked off this critical political gathering of China’s senior leadership. Xi directly defended the approach as being necessary to save lives and ultimately return the country to a sound footing both from an economic and public standpoint. According to a report from scientists at Fudan University in Shanghai, China could see as many as 1.6 million deaths without the virus curbs due to the fact that only about 1 million...
Russian Grain Markets: 29 June-3 July 2026 The new marketing season has officially begun in Russia, although bearish sentiment has been concentrated in the southern regions closest to the Black Sea ports, where export demand has been weakest. Delays in grain deliveries to inland elevators have...
What You Need to Know Today: The hot, dry weather forecast continues to drive strength in grain futures with corn and soybeans hitting another day of strong gains. Monday’s Crop Progress and Conditions data were in line with market expectations and showed relatively few concerns for the...
Yesterday we wrote about the Q1 GDP numbers and the June employment reports in an article entitled Real GDP for Q1 Relying on AI Buildout, Held Back by Consumer Spending. That article mentioned that consumer spending had become a drag on GDP. Nonetheless, real GDP in Q1 was revised upward to 2...
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.