One of the thorniest issues involved in setting speculative position limits concerns the exemptions that commercial market users are able to receive for positions that are bona fide hedges against risks they face in the course of conducting their businesses.The process of setting maximum limits on the size of long and short positions that speculators are allowed to hold in commodity futures, options and swaps markets is highly complex. In fact, it is much more so than Congress envisioned when it passed the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation in 2010. To the general public, there has always seemed to be something unsavory about speculation and speculators. This attitude was quickly adopted by many of the political class, and excessive sp...
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 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.