Last week the personal income data for August was released; income in August was up 0.4 percent and on the year is up 4.8 percent. The driver was private sector wages, which were up 0.5 percent on the month and 5.6 percent on the year. That’s good news, compared to the COVID era when government payments to individuals was the driver. Consumer spending matched income, rising 0.4 percent on the month. Note, consumer spending is the biggest factor in the simple GDP equation of Consumer Spending plus Private Domestic Investment plus Government Purchases plus Net Exports, … or C + I + G + (X-M) – where X is exports and M is imports. Spending on goods was up 0.6 percent and spending on services was up...
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.