Ship Subsidies: The SHIPS for America Act has been introduced in the U.S. Congress and is intended to boost the number of U.S. built ships. Currently, China builds over half the world’s ships, and over 90 percent are constructed in just three countries (China, South Korea, Japan). The U.S. builds just 0.1 percent of the world’s fleet. The Jones Act requires that half of American food aid be moved on U.S. flagged vessels. This reduces the amount of food aid because more money is spent on transport. The SHIPS act would give subsidies to agricultural exporters to offset higher shipping costs.Sliver of Truth: One outcome of the Trump era is the acknowledgement that there is always a sliver of truth. Economists generally think tariffs are distor...
WPI recently completed an expansion of our methodology for estimating and forecasting U.S. and global soybean crushing margins. The new approach incorporates the energy market’s expanding influence on the oilseed sector and the structural changes in global biofuel demand. This report is i...
Reflect for a moment on what you eat. There is a lot of advice out there in the ether about what you should eat, but really, what do you currently eat and how much? The good people at the USDA have some data for you, to help you answer that question. USDA says that we eat quite a bit of meat. L...
Key Market Insights Macros: Inflation isn’t cooling — it’s moving higher again. March PCE inflation (Personal Consumption Expenditures index — the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation) rose 0.7 percent month-over-month, pushing the annual rate to 3.5 percent, the h...
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.