One reason that Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine was a sense of immunity against reprisal due to external dependence on Russia’s energy supplies and food. He was wrong about the reprisal calculation but not about dependence. The OECD’s Composite of leading indicators (CLIs) point to economic growth losing momentum in Europe. Nationalists fault global interdependence and globalists argue that resilience would be worse without interdependence. Robert Armstrong and Ethan Wu at the Financial Times point to deeper structural hurdles in Europe. According to the OECD, Europeans are substantially more dependent on government pension transfers than are Americans. In fact, Pew Research found that most U.S. households have some level of inv...
What You Need to Know Today: The corn and soybean markets closed slightly higher in low-volume trade. The wheat market was mixed, with HRW continuing its downward trek on improved moisture. As expected, the bearish cattle on feed report drove down cattle prices and pulled hogs down with it. Mi...
Monday, 25 May is a U.S. holiday, and both the markets and our office will be closed. Please note that the next issue of Ag Perspectives will be published on Tuesday, 26 May. The WPI staff wishes everyone a safe and enjoyable holiday weekend...
USDA’s monthly cattle on feed report was released today. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity amounted to 11.6 million head, 102 percent of last year. Source: USDA, WPI Placements were up, but part of that is attributable to persistent drought c...
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.