International Agency Capture Regulatory capture occurs when a policymaker or regulator is co-opted to serve the interests of a minor constituency. That capture has now occurred to two international agencies, the WTO and the IEA. The WTO is dysfunctional because it has been recast as a development agency rather than a promoter of increased global trade. The latest international body to be subjugated is the International Energy Agency. Instead of fostering energy security from all possible sources, it is singularly focused on championing renewables and climate action. It continues to predict the end to coal even as the fundamentals show that its use will only continue to rise. Running Out of Crap The policy energy failure by Germany...
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.
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...