Public Health COVID Restrictions Eased in Some Key Cities, Tension Lingers The recent public protests in Shanghai and Beijing marked a level of civil unrest not normally seen in China, since the landmark event of Tiananmen Square in 1989. This is not to say that protests or outrage over government policies do occur, but generally speaking, when there have been public demonstrations, the focus has been on local or provincial level officials. Open chants calling for the leader of China, Xi Jinping, to step down after he was recently appointed to a third term, as has just occurred in Shanghai, reflect just how tired and frustrated the populace has grown with country’s zero-COVID strategy and its effect on the overall economy. As...
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.