Misdiagnosed U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said this week that, “Higher food and energy prices are having stagflationary effects, namely depressing output and spending and raising inflation all around the world.” She pushed for increased international food aid and advised international financial institutions to address acute food shortages. Stagflation is not depressing food output – war and weather are the culprits. It also is not to blame in energy markets, where war, monopolistic OPEC practices, and Western discouragement of fossil fuels are to blame. Such misdiagnoses risk the wrong policy responses to address the root causes. Potemkin Trade Policy In a few days, President Biden will announce the...
What You Need to Know Today: The G7 agreed to release 100 million barrels of crude oil and fuel reserves over four months, with a substantial diesel release front-loaded into the first 20 days. The announcement initially pushed crude oil lower on Friday, although it later recovered a portion o...
In a recent social media post, R-CALF unveiled its latest cattle market plan: “contracts that bind producers before establishing a base price, then tie that price to future negotiated cash transactions, should be prohibited.” That proposal aligns with recent legislation by Represent...
Key Takeaways: The recent pearl-clutching from parts of the beef industry regarding the loss of the daily Kansas fed cattle negotiated trade pricing report is overwrought and ignores the fact that the direction was readily apparent. The shift away from negotiated trade has been well docu...
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.