The May jobs data came out; there was an increase in private payrolls of 559,000 jobs. At any other time, other than post COVID era, that would be bullish news for the economy and the equities market. Instead, it was bearish. The expectation was 675,000 jobs, and we are still 7.6 million jobs down from where the economy was pre-COVID. There’s much discussion about federal unemployment benefits whether they are creating a hurdle to hiring. The math is simple: compared to the last pre-pandemic month, February 2020, average hourly earnings are up 6.4 percent; total hours worked are down 3.6 percent. Agriculture is seeing an impact across the board with meat and poultry plant workers, transportation, loading dock and warehou...
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.