Inflation is worrisome to the public and so politicians feel compelled to deflect any blame from themselves. Thus, President Biden called for an FTC investigation of oil companies for rising gasoline prices even as his Administration has frozen certain federal lands from exploration and has raised lease prices on others. Not to be outdone, populist Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren (D) demanded a Justice Department investigation into poultry companies for the higher price of turkey approaching the Thanksgiving holiday. The four top poultry firms control 54 percent of the market share. The Senator did not mention the equally high rise in the cost of used automobiles, or the fact that rental cars have risen 78 percent more than turkey pr...
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.
What You Need to Know Today: There has already been a strong run of flash soybean sales announcements in recent weeks, but more than 1.4 MMT reported this morning is an exceptionally large single-day total with major implications for the market. If the sales to China and unknown destinations w...
On Friday, at 6:57 AM, President Donald Trump announced, via a social media post, a 90-day window during which up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef could be imported outside of tariff-rate quotas—a move aimed at bringing down costs for American consumers. This is the secon...