The market opened today as it had closed from the previous night’s session, with double digit declines in many contracts. An hour into today’s session, first soymeal, then corn, then HRW and hogs turned green. Many then wobbled both sides of unchanged. There was a new contract low in soymeal, though ultimately it was joined by HRW in being the only two major contracts with an upside close. The dollar is now down 2.5 percent, so it will not offset the impact of higher tariffs as estimated by the Treasury Department, but it will make exports more competitive. Canada and Mexico being spared for now in the fight were key for stability. Going forward, the market wants to know how this impacts consumer spending. The trade...
What You Need to Know Today: Last week’s Trump-Xi meetings included China agreeing to roll back $60 billion in tariffs on a huge swath of U.S. ag products, just notably not soybeans. The exclusion of soybeans from the tariff-reduction list means China’s state-run importers COFCO an...
Mexico Trade Deal The Trump Administration is looking for a win before the November midterm elections, now just five weeks away, especially as trade relations with Canada worsen and there is now a truce with China. The U.S. has made it clear to Mexican officials that it wants a deal with Mexico...
Key Takeaways: The U.S.-China agreement lowers tariffs on several U.S. agricultural products, but the lack of additional soybean commitments or greater certainty surrounding China’s existing 25 MMT purchase pledge made the deal a slight disappointment. Lower tariffs on U.S. corn are unli...
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.