The signals regarding TPP just days before President Obama heads to Japan are mixed and confusing. Currency Conundrum Some powerful congressional Democrats are spitting venom over President Obama headed to Japan next week and possibly pushing for closure on Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations (though a Japanese official has denied TPP is on the agenda). A burning issue for these Democrats is purported currency manipulation, and candidate Obama pledged in 2008 to stop China from the practice. Five years hence, his Treasury Department has once again determined that none of America's major trading partners is manipulating their currency. The report issued this week declares the Chinese yuan "significantly undervalued" as a result of...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. weather is getting more attention this week as conditions vary greatly across the western, central, and eastern corn belts, with the different regions battling dryness and too much rain simultaneously. The ProFarmer Crop Tour began today in Indiana and Nebrask...
Key Takeaways: Argentina is on pace for a record corn crop and record exports in the current marketing year, with abundant supplies likely to keep the country highly competitive in global export markets. Argentina’s record exportable surplus is allowing it to offer highly competitive pri...
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.