The news is saturated with talk about the fiscal cliff and its impact on the economy. What if -- just for argument's sake -- the cliff is not as big as we think it is? Remember, for the last three years we've been hearing about the next big catalyst that will take down or stall the economy; thus far there has been Egypt, Greece, Spain, the Gulf oil spill, U.S. debt downgrading, the tsunami in Japan, and several other factors. We've been waiting for the double-dip recession since 2009 -- it has been long enough that it will not accurately be called a "dip" any more. What if -- again, just for argument's sake -- we're already in the process of scaling down the cliff and there is a safe, soft landing at the bottom?The economy has been slow b...
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.