Both the farm bill and FY 2018 spending authority for the federal government expire on 30 September. This means that in addition to the farm bill conference, Congress must also pass a budget for FY 2019. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently released some estimates of spending cuts in the budget necessary to reduce the federal debt, which today stands at 78 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) and is expected to grow to 152 percent by 2048 versus 41 percent over the past 50 years. The third benchmark for the spending targets is to have federal debt at 100 percent of GDP. If lawmakers wanted to lower debt to 41 percent of GDP by 2048, the primary budget deficit would have to be reduced to 3 percent of GDP and held there for 29...
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 big news in the cattle markets yesterday was Tyson Foods’ move to close two more beef plants. One of them, the Joslin, Illinois, plant was shuttered immediately after the announcement. The other, in Eagle Mountain, Utah, is a case-ready plant that does not slaughter cattle. Tyson also...
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.