China has adjusted its government stockpile auction system in an incomplete effort to cool over-heated demand and prices for its reserve corn. High bid rates and outsized demand is expected to continue into the sixth auction of the season. Attempting to control the bid process is a classic rejection of the capitalist use of prices to manage supply and demand. Higher bidding prices will eventually temper price and demand. Beijing also apparently rejects increasing supply via imports, which would concurrently cool prices and better meet demand. China has a long policy history of attempting to have its cake and eating it too – ensuring higher prices to corn farmers while not choking off the livestock sector’s ability to meet consu...
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...
What You Need to Know Today: Wholesale inflation was flat in July, with the Producer Price Index (PPI) unchanged versus expectations for a 0.2 percent increase. Core PPI rose 0.2 percent, also below expectations. The softer inflation data has reduced the odds of a September interest rate incre...
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.