"Rut Ro" Trade In the animated television series Scooby-Doo from the early 1970’s, the talking dog star of the show called Scooby-Doo warned of danger by saying “rut ro” instead of uh oh. Free trade proponents in Washington are right now saying “rut ro” about a study released this week by the U.S. International Trade Commission assessing the impact of trade agreements over the past four decades. The career civil servant economists at the agency found that trade agreements only managed to boost U.S. economic output by 0.5 percent. The concern is that this will reinforce for the Biden Administration that trade agreements are not worth the political angst that they cause. Agriculture likely benefits disproportion...
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...
What You Need to Know Today: The hot, dry weather forecast continues to drive strength in grain futures with corn and soybeans hitting another day of strong gains. Monday’s Crop Progress and Conditions data were in line with market expectations and showed relatively few concerns for the...
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.