Like Lord Tennyson’s troops lined up in the Crimean War, sometimes we are just fodder in the commodity markets. After 40 days and 40 nights of withdrawal from government data reports, we watched as the momentum built for today’s noon EST release of USDA November WASDE report. In the...
Dry-bulk markets were higher last week amid improved freight inquiries, tightening tonnage lists, and traders hoping for increased grain business in late November and early December. Despite hopes to the contrary, there has been essentially no confirmation of any U.S. grain export business to C...
The U.S. government reopened today and the data fog partially lifted in Washington. However, many economic reports will first require time to repopulate their databases. USDA made the decision to publish the November WASDE tomorrow ahead of the agreement to reopen the government and traders spe...
Writing about what the markets say will happen the day before a major USDA report is always a risky - but still useful - endeavor. This year, the recent U.S. government shutdown and U.S.-China trade war/trade deal intensify these dynamics of risk and worthiness. The shutdown, of course, by remo...
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.