As noted in the analysis on recession impacts on grain demand, the Great Recession is an imperfect proxy for predicting the impacts on the current global economic downturn. It may be more like the shock events of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, or the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan, but those are narrower impacting events. Before markets became as sophisticated, most recessions were the result of supply/demand imbalances. A burst of outsized capital investment followed by a productivity led decline in labor demand stoked the 2001 recession. It turns out that this time really is different. None of those prior events involved the labor shortages and reworked processes currently being experienced in the meat packing industry. Nonetheles...
What You Need to Know Today: President Trump claimed the ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran was over, as both sides accused one another of violating the terms of the agreement. Commercial vessels are increasingly steering clear of the Strait of Hormuz as security risks escalate following Iran...
Key Takeaways: The CME Group is launching new 90 percent Lean Beef and 50 percent Lean Beef futures and options contracts in July. There are five key factors that must be present in physical markets and futures contract specifications for futures contracts to become successful. The two l...
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.