Diluted Brinksmanship Politicians do not usually make unpleasant decisions until and unless they are forced into a corner. That is the whole point of brinkmanship in politics - to force a change in position. However, the two current and most prominent efforts at brinkmanship, the U.S. trade war with China and the government shutdown in Washington over a border wall, have more holes than a slab of Swiss cheese. The Trump administration has been handing out exclusions from its steel and aluminum tariffs, and now USTR is promising to grant more of them if it is forced to impose an additional $200 billion in tariffs in early March should negotiations with China fail. Does China grant exclusions to its counter-retaliatory tariffs? Meanwhile, t...
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.