The grain trade returned to work last night with the strong possibility that the much-anticipated trade deal with China might not happen. This was based on President Trump’s weekend tweet that he will increase tariffs on Chinese imports from 10 percent to 25 percent. This sent grain and oilseed markets as well as equity markets crashing lower. No one knows for certain what happened during the negotiations late last week to sour the brew. It was widely speculated today that China had backtracked on some previous concessions, including those that would require changes in its laws. President Trump, likely on the advice of his trade team, decided to fire a warning shot across the bow. The selling panic that seemed close last night and e...
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.