As has been well documented in the news over the past week, the Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) kept the federal funds rate unchanged on 1 November. This comes after the September meeting when the FOMC had initially signaled there would be one more rate hike this year. The Fed also opted not to raise rates in September. The question is, will July 2023 be the last rate hike of this tightening? The decision came after the sky high Q3 GDP growth of 4.9 percent. But there is more behind the curtain regarding that report. First, it was driven by consumer spending. In fact, much of that spending was on services, and within that, the Barbie movie and Taylor Swift and Beyonce’s concert tours. That doesn&rsq...
What You Need to Know Today: There has already been a strong run of flash soybean sales announcements in recent weeks, but more than 1.4 MMT reported this morning is an exceptionally large single-day total with major implications for the market. If the sales to China and unknown destinations w...
On Friday, at 6:57 AM, President Donald Trump announced, via a social media post, a 90-day window during which up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef could be imported outside of tariff-rate quotas—a move aimed at bringing down costs for American consumers. This is the secon...
From WPI Consulting
Forecasting developments in production agriculture
On behalf of a private U.S. agricultural technology provider, WPI’s team generated an econometric model to forecast the movement of concentrated corn production north and west from the traditional U.S. Corn Belt. WPI’s model has subsequently provided quantitative support to a multi-million-dollar investment into short-season corn variety development. WPI’s methodology included a series of interviews with regional grain elevators and seed consultants. Emphasizing outreach and communication with stakeholders who possess intimate sectoral knowledge – on-the-ground insights – is a regular component of WPI’s methodologies, made possible by WPI’s ever-growing network of industry contacts.