World Perspectives

Detailed Devil

The agreement between EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and U.S. President Donald Trump may be like the earlier Kim Jong-un/Donald Trump agreement – a stalemate with too many details to be overly hopeful. The upside is that each side will refrain from imposing new duties. The concept of free trade in industrial goods is a carve-out of what was agreed in the earlier TTIP negotiations. Agriculture was not even mentioned as a negotiating area, but there was an EU commitment to buy more U.S. agricultural goods, including soybeans. That is mercantilist word-play below the dignity of two market economies. EU and U.S. companies should buy from the best value sources – period. An upside is the apparent collaborative approach...

Related Articles

Barriers are Good; Squeezed in the Trade War; Calculating the Impacts; Tax is a Tax

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 (taxe...

feed-grains soy-oilseeds

2025/2026 Trade Update

Almost none of the primary U.S. grain or oilseed offerings have made a solid start to 2025-26, as export sales for the upcoming marketing year are largely near multi-year lows. This is not yet a huge problem since the typical buying periods for the season’s supplies are mostly still in th...

Good Friday

Tomorrow, 18 April, is a holiday for the CBOT/CME markets in observance of Good Friday. Please note that our office will also be closed. The next Ag Perspectives will be published Monday, 21 April. ...

Barriers are Good; Squeezed in the Trade War; Calculating the Impacts; Tax is a Tax

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 (taxe...

feed-grains soy-oilseeds

2025/2026 Trade Update

Almost none of the primary U.S. grain or oilseed offerings have made a solid start to 2025-26, as export sales for the upcoming marketing year are largely near multi-year lows. This is not yet a huge problem since the typical buying periods for the season’s supplies are mostly still in th...

Good Friday

Tomorrow, 18 April, is a holiday for the CBOT/CME markets in observance of Good Friday. Please note that our office will also be closed. The next Ag Perspectives will be published Monday, 21 April. ...

Trade War Machinations; Chicken War; Uncomfortable Europe; MAHA Coke

Trade War Machinations EU trade negotiator Maros Sefcovic left Washington saying the Trump Administration’s trade policy goals were unclear. Yet, the EU rejected Washington’s offer to drop tariffs if Brussels reduces trade ties with China and removes food safety barriers to American...

Image
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.

Search World Perspectives

Sign In to World Perspectives

Don’t have an account yet? Sign Up