The ability to export crude oil, which was granted to U.S. producers in December 2015, is still a game changer in the energy markets. Global crude oil averaged $54/barrel in 2017, up $10/barrel from the previous year. That increase is fairly limited, however, given the 4.5 percent cut in production that members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) each agreed during the fourth quarter of 2016 to target. OPEC’s production averaged 32.5 million barrels/day in 2017, down 0.2 million barrels/day from the year before. Its members agreed on 30 November 2017 to extend the production cuts through the end of 2018, and the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) is forecasting the average price for Brent crude will b...
What You Need to Know Today: Commodities were mostly lower across the board today after yesterday’s Federal Reserve meeting hinted at a potential interest rate hike later in 2026. The dollar index reached its highest level in over a year, and a strong dollar makes U.S. agricultural expor...
Tomorrow is the Juneteenth federal holiday, and the USDA, along with the rest of the federal government and the CME, will be closed, so the monthly Cattle on Feed report was released a day early. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity on 1 June amounted...
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.