Despite high gas prices, the American Automobile Association (AAA) is predicting heavy travel over this long weekend for the 4th of July holiday, forecasting the total to be roughly equal to 2019, prior to COVID. A few factors are at play for increased car travel: after two years of COVID restrictions, people are ready to travel on vacation. Further, the ongoing disruption to airline schedules (with 1,000s of flights cancelled over Memorial Day, Fathers’ Day and Juneteenth weekends) has more people opting to drive, which is also catalyzed by airline fares which are up about 45 percent over pre-pandemic 2019 averages. Finally, with the airline disruptions, people are planning closer to home vacations this weekend, meaning...
What You Need to Know Today: Russia rejected calls for a ceasefire in the Black Sea, including a proposal to halt attacks on civilian shipping that could help restore grain flows from Ukrainian ports. Tyson Foods announced plans to permanently close its Joslin, Illinois, beef processing facili...
The big news in the cattle markets yesterday was Tyson Foods’ move to close two more beef plants. One of them, the Joslin, Illinois, plant was shuttered immediately after the announcement. The other, in Eagle Mountain, Utah, is a case-ready plant that does not slaughter cattle. Tyson also...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on Wednesday. In July, the CPI rose 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted, and rose 3.4 percent over the last 12 months, not seasonally adjusted. The index for all items less food and energy, or the “core” infla...
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.