World Perspectives

Tariffs and Treasury Bonds

Treasury securities are one of the safest investments in times of economic chaos. Proof of that in the havoc over the present trade disputes may be the current flattening of the yield curve in bonds. With last year’s tax cut bill and the effective moratorium on new regulations, the economy has been solid (to put it mildly). Consider the following: Corporate profits reported at the end of June (with the GDP growth rate) were a record $1.92 trillion on an annualized basis, up more than 16 percent versus last year. Truck tonnage, which reflects the amount of freight of manufactured goods and goods destined for retail sale, was up 9.5 percent from May 2017 to April 2018. Intermodal rail shipments through the first five months of the...

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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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