World Perspectives

Tilting at Windmills; Floored Prices; Greenwashing Sustainability

Tilting at Windmills China is being chided in the financial press for trying to limit commodity prices. In addition to scrutinizing pricing platforms, Beijing is auctioning stockpiles and warning against speculation. This approach ignores the real impacts of underlying demand, which the government itself is guilty of stoking. However, the more award aspect for China is that markets depend on accurate information, which is too often characterized as a state secret. Even China’s soybean import data, which can be verified via suppliers’ export data and shipping logs, runs behind reflecting actual purchases. Supply/demand imbalances are solved with transparency, not with browbeating market participants. Floored Prices We noted th...

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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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