So far 2020 has been difficult, to put it mildly. It started out on a high note with an apparent truce between the U.S. and China when the Phase One trade agreement was signed in mid-January. But it has been downhill from there. The big issue, of course, is the global coronavirus pandemic. COVID-19 has sickened more than eight million people representing every populated continent with the number of deaths nearing 450,000. The economic fallout from the global efforts to limit spread of the virus has been and will continue to be severe. In aggregate the world economy has taken a bigger hit than it did during the Great Recession of 2009/10. Only now are governments taking cautious steps to reopen their economies, and plenty of questions...
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.