Undermining Justice The U.S. Justice Department announced it was dismissing two more price fixing cases against poultry companies. This follows two other cases dismissed last month, and not guilty verdicts by jury against five other defendants that constituted the agency’s third failed attempt to prosecute them. It is a miserable record. The agency said it is ending the latest cases “in an effort to conserve the resources of the Court, the parties, and the public.” The Biden Administration has made clear that it sees anticompetitive practices by agribusiness, and it is pursuing legal actions against the industry. It falsely blames companies for inflation and is clearly chasing ghosts. Worse, it is undermining confidence i...
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.
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...
Yesterday we wrote about the Q1 GDP numbers and the June employment reports in an article entitled Real GDP for Q1 Relying on AI Buildout, Held Back by Consumer Spending. That article mentioned that consumer spending had become a drag on GDP. Nonetheless, real GDP in Q1 was revised upward to 2...
Key Takeaways: The Middle East and North Africa's arid climate and limited water resources have created a structural dependence on imported wheat. Government wheat tenders in major importing countries serve as important benchmarks for global trade, providing insight into exporter competitivene...