World Perspectives

October Jobs Report Tepid

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the October jobs report this morning.  Total nonfarm payroll employment was essentially unchanged in October (+12,000), and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.1 percent.  The pre-report consensus was for an additional 100,000 payroll jobs.  The October report was, excluding 2020, which was the first year of COVID, the smallest gain for any month since early 2019. As WPI noted on 29 October, the September payroll report had some bullish topline numbers, but digging deeper into the report showed some signs of potential concern.   Despite job growth (of 254,000 new jobs), the total hours worked slipped downward in September, to an average of 34.2-hour work week.&...

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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.

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