Antitrust Dust European antitrust officials have been busy, and their latest target is a large but declining giant called Coca Cola. The investigation might be about practices, but it cannot be about market share. Market share alone is a baffling approach. Google is a monopoly, but it must be doing something right because 80 percent of online researchers use it and like it. If Google were to be broken up would the resulting change in competition get us to Mars faster? Coca Cola has so many challenges. Its top product is labeled as empty calories that lead to obesity, sickness, and finally death. In blind taste tests, this product is easily matched by several competitors. The whole soft drink industry is under assault, most notably in Mexic...
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.