WTO Foil Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) added arguments to his call for a U.S. withdrawal from the WTO but they are not necessarily good ones. Hawley will use procedural requirements to get a Senate vote on WTO withdrawal and he will lose badly. The House has far more trade skeptics than the Senate and past efforts at withdrawal in that body managed to get just 12 to 19 percent support. Look for half that number at best in a Senate vote. His arguments reinforce President Trump’s complaints about the global trade body, but they are purely rhetorical. His latest is that the WTO limits the amount of subsidies that can be given to farmers. This is true but to a far less degree than the limits it places on most other countries. Moreove...
What You Need to Know Today: President Trump claimed the ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran was over, as both sides accused one another of violating the terms of the agreement. Commercial vessels are increasingly steering clear of the Strait of Hormuz as security risks escalate following Iran...
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...
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.