Key Market Developments Markets head into Friday’s CPI report expecting a 0.3 percent month-over-month increase in both headline and core inflation, keeping year-over-year readings near +2.5 percent. That matters — but perhaps not as much as it would have a few weeks ago. This week’s stronger jobs number already gives the Fed room to pause. Even if CPI runs hot, policymakers will likely want multiple months of confirmation before shifting course. A softer reading could lean risk-on, though it would take a meaningful surprise to significantly disrupt broader markets. The bigger story today feels less about CPI and more about positioning. Equity markets pulled back, led by a sharp unwind in technology and software shares. Re...
What You Need to Know Today: The hot, dry weather forecast continues to drive strength in grain futures with corn and soybeans hitting another day of strong gains. Monday’s Crop Progress and Conditions data were in line with market expectations and showed relatively few concerns for the...
Yesterday we wrote about the Q1 GDP numbers and the June employment reports in an article entitled Real GDP for Q1 Relying on AI Buildout, Held Back by Consumer Spending. That article mentioned that consumer spending had become a drag on GDP. Nonetheless, real GDP in Q1 was revised upward to 2...
Key Takeaways: The Middle East and North Africa's arid climate and limited water resources have created a structural dependence on imported wheat. Government wheat tenders in major importing countries serve as important benchmarks for global trade, providing insight into exporter competitivene...
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.