Exercising its new role under Dodd-Frank, the CFTC filed a civil lawsuit yesterday (1 April) in federal court charging Kraft Foods Group LLC and its affiliate with manipulation of the Chicago wheat futures market in 2011 in an effort to affect the cash market for SRW as well as wheat futures market spreads.The Commodity Futures Trading Authority (CFTC) was created in 1974 by an act of Congress as an independent agency charged with overseeing and regulating futures exchanges and futures trading. It replaced the Commodity Exchange Authority (CEA), an office within USDA that had been established in 1933 primarily to reign in the kind of unregulated speculation and market manipulation in grain futures markets prevalent at the Chicago Board of T...
What You Need to Know Today: The corn and soybean markets closed slightly higher in low-volume trade. The wheat market was mixed, with HRW continuing its downward trek on improved moisture. As expected, the bearish cattle on feed report drove down cattle prices and pulled hogs down with it. Mi...
Key Market Insights Macro markets delivered a full whipsaw today. Early in the session, crude oil had rallied back above $100/barrel as traders priced renewed concern over the U.S.-Iran standoff and potential supply risk through the Strait of Hormuz. That strength helped pull grains off their o...
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.