As we noted yesterday, the $3 trillion Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (HEROES) Act amends the CCC Charter Act to allow assistance to agricultural processing plants in the event of a public health emergency in order to assure the continuation of markets for agricultural commodities. The bill is scheduled for a vote today at 5:30 pm and is expected to pass, largely on a party-line vote. Specifically, the proposal would provide $0.45 per gallon of ethanol produced from 1 January 1 through 1 May 2020. Further, producers forced offline for one or more calendar months during this time would qualify, at USDA’s discretion, for the same payment based on half the volume produced during the corresponding mo...
What You Need to Know Today: Corn and soybean futures were lower to open the week, with funds still in control and in a selling mood. The upcoming WASDE report on Tuesday is also likely to feature larger corn and soybean stocks, which helped put grain futures on the defensive. Wheat futures we...
Key Takeaways: Currency exchange rates influence agricultural export competitiveness and producer profitability, even when underlying commodity prices remain unchanged. A weaker domestic currency allows agricultural exporters to receive more local currency for dollar-denominated sales, potenti...
Although inflation has remained elevated since the post-COVID surge, it steadily moderated until the past year. More to the point, today’s inflation looks very different from 2022, when the Consumer Price Index (CPI) peaked at 9 percent. During and after the pandemic, the M2 money supply...
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.