World Perspectives

Fed’s Next Move

The Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) will be meeting again in June, and the markets are expecting a federal fund rate hike to 2 percent. The only real surprise would be if the increase was more than 25 basis points. When the rate was raised in March to the current 1.75 percent, the Fed released its so-called dot-plot. This is a chart with dots that each represent a Fed member’s view on where the federal fund rate should be at the end of the year as well as the following one. The dot-plot showed a median of 2.9 percent by the end of 2019, which could be interpreted as three rate increases this year (March and then presumably two more in June and December), and two next year with 3.4 percent reached in 2020...

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Illuminating the value of technical research

On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.

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