President-Elect Joe Biden has started the process of naming cabinet nominees, beginning with the top agencies of Treasury and State. Janet Yellen will be nominated to be Secretary of the Treasury. The equity markets reacted favorably as she is a respected and known entity among the names that were floated. It gave the financial sector a boost in confidence. She was Chair of the Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2018 and was Vice Chair from 2010 to 2014. Previously, she was the head of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors during the Clinton Administration and during the late 1970’s she was a staff economist at the Federal Reserve. She was chairman when the Fed started the incremental interest rate increases in December of 201...
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
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.