Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell delivered his address to the Federal Reserve’s annual policy conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming on Friday. Last year, Powell was short, direct, cautionary, and hawkish. The equities market tumbled afterwards. This year he was a little more circumspect, but not reassuring, as he likened the Fed’s monetary policy making to "navigating by the stars under cloudy skies." Specifically, he made mention of a theme on which WPI has been commenting for some time: conflicting data. Per our 2 June report on jobs data: As WPI has reported many times over the past two years, conventional economic data is difficult to decipher because the impact of COVID and its aftermath were anything but...
The U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) enters its mandated six-year review on 1 July. The original intent of the review is outlined in Article 34.7, which obligates members to: Provide recommendations and decide on appropriate actions. Extend the USMCA for another 16 years and meet aga...
Key Market Insights Geopolitical Limbo: Geopolitical risk remained a key driver across global commodity markets today. President Trump stated that the Iran memorandum of understanding is not yet final and warned that military action could resume if negotiations fail. Both sides continue w...
Key Takeaways: Drought remains a major threat to global agricultural production, particularly in regions with limited rainfall and growing water scarcity. Commercially available drought-tolerant traits in corn, soybeans, and wheat have generally delivered modest yield improvements, limiting th...
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.