Debt Leverage Volatility Markets hate uncertainty but the upcoming hardball political play in Washington is as transparent as cellophane. Congressional Democrats are going to put $3.5 trillion worth of deficit spending and policy dreams into a legislative package that they hope to steamroll over Republicans using the budget reconciliation process. The only leverage Republicans hold to prevent such a massive change in government policy and spending is the need to legislatively raise the official sanctioned amount of debt held by taxpayers. Failing to raise the debt ceiling would place taxpayers in default and will be framed as reckless by the Democrats. Ultimately, the debt ceiling will be raised but in small increments over time so that it...
What You Need to Know Today: Iran says its definition of the Strait of Hormuz is now a “vast operation area” that stretches from Jask to Siri Island. The White House said President Trump did not sign a suspension of the TRQs on beef imports but is “finalizing potential...
If the media headlines and Trump critics are to be believed, President Trump is headed to Beijing this Thursday in a weakened position. China is in control, it has the upper hand, and expectations are very low. These are the same critics that argue against overly simplistic zero-sum analyses in...
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.