World Perspectives

Ruble Collapse

While Russia had amassed $630 billion in foreign exchange reserves, its removal from SWIFT, the freezing of its overseas assets, and sanctions on its banks will nonetheless collapse the value of the ruble. At present, banks are not providing an exchange value though an app in Russia says it has fallen to 150 rubles/dollar, versus 83 rubles on Friday and 63 back in January. However, history suggests a much worse situation is approaching. At the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ruble sank to 5,560₽/dollar. Moscow had tried previously to fix the ruble at 5₽/dollar, but the market didn’t recognize it. Even worse, when the Bolsheviks took over in 1917, they refused to pay the bond holders of the previous regime’s debt and the ruble...

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feed-grains soy-oilseeds wheat

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feed-grains soy-oilseeds wheat

Black Sea Regional Analysis

Russian Grains Market: 22–26 September 2025 The Russian grains market remained stable with a slightly bearish tone, particularly for corn, which led declines amid ongoing harvests and steady export flows. Barley and corn weakness is expected to pressure feed wheat prices. Peas are also un...

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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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