World Perspectives

Dollar Drives Globe Slower

Commodity markets are weakening both due to higher interest rates depressing demand and slowed world trade, and because many are traded based on the dollar, which has skyrocketed in value. Technically, it can be argued that it is the euro/pound/yen that have weakened since the dollar’s value has maintained relative value to emerging market currencies excluding China and Russia. Though emerging markets still face the risk of distressed debt as they’ve overspent reserves to slow their own inflationary pressures.  The bottom line is that global trading links to the dollar remain strong, and the Federal Reserve’s effort to slow the U.S. economy is concurrently slowing global GDP growth. UNCTAD sees global development sta...

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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.

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