Aggressive New EU Leadership Under John Claude Juncker, the EU seemed confused on how to deal with Donald Trump, never having previously experienced such antagonism from an American leader. There was even a nonsensical trade agreement letter that was supposed to reduce the transatlantic tensions. Not anymore. The verbiage from the incoming government of Ursula von der Leyen is combative, adopting the pugilistic style of Trump himself. While incoming trade commissioner (and outgoing agriculture minister) Phil Hogan says the EU will show Trump the “error” of his “protectionist policies,” the illustration appears to be the adoption of a Europe first, Make Europe Great Again theme. Here are some of the rhetorical shape...
What You Need to Know Today: Oil prices extended their rally Tuesday as disruptions to global supplies intensified. Saudi Arabia halted crude loadings at its Yanbu Red Sea port following the shutdown of the East-West Pipeline, while protests by oil-sector security workers forced the suspension...
The USDA has lowered its 2026 red meat production forecasts while leaving poultry almost unchanged. Beef is now projected at 24.877 billion pounds, 90 million pounds below August on slower Q3 fed cattle slaughter and lighter dressed weights, along with an anticipated counterseasonal cutback in...
Beef packer margins deteriorated to $156.75/head last week, down $46.05 from the prior week as fed cattle prices strengthened while gains in the Choice cutout were comparatively modest. The Choice cutout increased...
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.