Ronald Reagan famously said, “If you want more of something, subsidize it; if you want less of something tax it.” Some countries are moving forward with taxes on technology companies. After all, they are big, rich and offer up an easy fillip on government revenues. However, it can also be short-sighted in terms of broader economic advances. Understanding the benefits of Information & Communications Technology (ICT) can be difficult. After all, it costs relatively little and thus conventional models undervalue its contribution to GDP. Yet its low cost is what democratizes its benefits. It does not require a lot of GDP to acquire its benefits. As a result, over half the world’s population has access to the internet. Its...
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.