Macroeconomics Food Inflation for October Spikes to 15.5 Percent With retail pork prices rising in October by a staggering 101.3 percent, China’s food costs were up 15.5 percent compared with October 2018. This is the largest annualized increase since June 2011, when monthly food prices jumped by just under 15 percent from June 2010. October marked eight straight months of rising pork prices. Excluding food costs, China’s inflation was actually fairly modest with core consumer prices up by just 1.5 percent. Retail sales were up in September year-on-year by 7.8 percent and month-on-month by .7 percent. Consumer confidence also ticked up to 124.1 in September from 122.4 in August, as the country prepared for its 70th Anni...
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.