According to the news, multilateralism and globalization are in crisis. No less than U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell recently said, “it’s not hard to imagine a world where we break into these blocs again.” Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said there’s a growing feeling of a world that’s “forming blocs and choosing up teams.” Then again, R.E.M. sang, “It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.” This is the 25th anniversary of the Asian Financial Crisis. Although it notably adversely impacted Southeast Asia plus Korea and Japan, critics charged that it revealed the flaw in global integration. Global trade in major agricultural commodities that had been grow...
What You Need to Know Today: Commodities were mostly lower across the board today after yesterday’s Federal Reserve meeting hinted at a potential interest rate hike later in 2026. The dollar index reached its highest level in over a year, and a strong dollar makes U.S. agricultural expor...
Tomorrow is the Juneteenth federal holiday, and the USDA, along with the rest of the federal government and the CME, will be closed, so the monthly Cattle on Feed report was released a day early. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity on 1 June amounted...
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.