China Rebuts U.S. China’s ambassador to the WTO, Zhang Xiangchen, had clever reactions to the U.S. criticism of his nation’s economic system, but that only creates worse worries for the future. He said that China never promised to switch from being a “socialist market economy” to a U.S.-style one as part of its accession plan. There was an assumption that China would change, but the ambassador correctly noted, “There is no one-size-fits-all ‘market economy’ standard in the world.” To his point, many of the transatlantic disputes evolve from ones over regulating the power of the market on the economy. Zhang is also correct that the WTO does not define a market economy and that the organizatio...
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
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.