Economic Risks Rise Chinese President Xi Jinping gives assurances that the coronavirus will be managed and that it will not hobble the economy, but finance officials elsewhere are amply worried. Agriculture is highly dependent on growing economies to expand demand at least fast enough to keep partial pace with higher productivity. The Chinese economy will clearly take a hit in first quarter 2020 and other economies already burdened by the trade war fallout face some drag from the coronavirus. Euro-area industrial output was down 2.1 percent in December, the sharpest fall in four years and some major components border on recession. The cornoavirus is expected to add a 0.1 to 0.2 percent decline in GDP growth this quarter. Wall Street...
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.