World Perspectives

Election Snapshot and the Farm Bill

With the 2018 midterm election three weeks away, the Democrats need a 23-seat pickup in the House of Representatives to reach the 218 seats (of 435) necessary to gain majority control, and all seats are up for election. RealClearPolitics, a polling aggregator, currently has the “over/under” pickup odds at plus 24.5 seats for Democratic candidates (see below).

Based on the above, 101 seats are in play to some degree with 29 rated as toss-ups. All of the latter are held by Republican incumbents, which stacks the odds in the Democrats’ favor. In the Senate, 51 seats are needed for a majority. With the vice president as the tie-breaking vote, however, Republicans would only need 50 seats for the next two years. There are 3...

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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.

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