President Trump said yesterday that all medium- and heavy-duty trucks imported into the U.S. will face a 25 percent tariff rate starting 1 November. That marks a significant escalation of Trump’s effort to protect U.S. companies from foreign competition. He had previously stated that heavy truck imports would face new duties to protect manufacturers from “unfair outside competition.” Under the trade deals with Japan and the EU, the U.S. agreed to 15 percent tariffs on light duty vehicles leaving it unclear whether imports of heavy-duty trucks would be subject to the higher tariffs. Generally, the Trump Administration has allowed producers to deduct the value of components from the tariffs on light duty tr...
What You Need to Know Today: Crude oil prices extended their rally today, supported by several developments, including escalating Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabian oil infrastructure and growing concerns about supply disruptions. The Trump administration is reportedly preparing to remove 50 perc...
Key Takeaways: The agricultural trade surplus has become a sizable deficit: the balance swung from a $40.1 billion surplus in 2011 to a $40.7 billion deficit in 2025. Imports kept growing while exports lost momentum: between 2020 and 2025, agricultural imports increased 45 percent, compa...
USDA released its October Cattle on Feed report Friday, showing 11.4 million cattle in feedlots with capacity for 1,000 head or more, slightly below last year. September placements were the lowest for the month since records began in 1996, marking the third consecutive month of placements sett...
Total Red Meat & Poultry September 2026 total red meat and poultry stocks totaled 1.97 billion pounds, down 1.4 percent from August despite typically increasing 0.8 percent during the month, and were 1.5 percent below September 2025 levels. The decline pushed total inventories to a new five...
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.