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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Black Sea Regional Analysis

Russian Grain Markets: 2–6 February 2026 The primary development during the first week of February was the allocation of grain export quotas for the balance of the 2025/26 marketing season. A total of 213 companies received export rights, compared with 219 companies in 2025. The majority...

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WASDE Wheat - Feb 2026

USDA’s outlook for 2025/26 U.S. wheat is unchanged for exports and slightly higher ending stocks to 931 million bushels - 9 percent higher than last year and the largest since 2019/20. The projected 2025/26 season-average farm price remains at $4.90 per bushel.  The global outlook fo...

WPI Website Security Update - 10 February

On the morning of 9 February, WPI identified unauthorized activity on our website server. Upon discovery, we immediately secured the website and server, took the necessary and advisable steps to examine the environment for comprimises, and deployed the website to a new, secure server.  Our...

feed-grains soy-oilseeds wheat

Black Sea Regional Analysis

Russian Grain Markets: 2–6 February 2026 The primary development during the first week of February was the allocation of grain export quotas for the balance of the 2025/26 marketing season. A total of 213 companies received export rights, compared with 219 companies in 2025. The majority...

wheat

WASDE Wheat - Feb 2026

USDA’s outlook for 2025/26 U.S. wheat is unchanged for exports and slightly higher ending stocks to 931 million bushels - 9 percent higher than last year and the largest since 2019/20. The projected 2025/26 season-average farm price remains at $4.90 per bushel.  The global outlook fo...

WPI Website Security Update - 10 February

On the morning of 9 February, WPI identified unauthorized activity on our website server. Upon discovery, we immediately secured the website and server, took the necessary and advisable steps to examine the environment for comprimises, and deployed the website to a new, secure server.  Our...

New World Screwworm Facility in the U.S.

In June 2025, Secretary Rollins announced a five-pronged plan to enhance USDA’s ability to detect, control, and eliminate NWS. As part of that announcement, she also shared plans to build a sterile NWS fly dispersal facility in South Texas. That announcement was made on 30 January, when U...

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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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