World Perspectives

Economic Outlook for 2026

The January jobs report surprised to the upside, coming in at 172,000 new jobs, well above the consensus expectation of 68,000. However, the February report showed jobs falling by 86,000, far off the consensus expectation of a gain of 60,000. This loss was driven by education, leisure and hospitality, and healthcare. Some underlying factors included a nurses’ strike, which hit healthcare and led to a drop of 28,000 jobs. Moreover, frigid and snowy weather hit half of the country in February. Both should reverse in March.  Taking the two months together, and including revisions, private payrolls increased by 30,000 per month. To be sure, a monthly gain of 30,000 jobs is on the weak end of the scale, but factoring in strict immigra...

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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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