The Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged at their 1 November meeting; Chairman Powell noted that this was a pause to let the 100-basis point increase in rates over the past year take full effect. This week, an initial sign that progress was being made was the October Consumer Price Index which remained unchanged. However, much of that was due to flagging energy prices, which dropped 2.5 percent after large increases in August and September. The CPI year-over-year was 3.2 percent; in October 2022 the 12-month CPI was 7.7 percent. Looking at different benchmarks, inflation was still up 4.4 percent over the August through October period. Looking at core inflation – the Fed’s benchmark, which excludes energy an...
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
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.