Support for free trade has ebbed and flowed in cycles that frequently track the ups and downs of national economies. Nearly every political leader is in favor of it or at least claims to be. Yet free trade is under frequent attack these days, and part of the problem is how it is defined.The 2016 G20 summit, a meeting of leaders from the world’s largest economies, will occur this weekend in Hangzhou, China. As this year’s host, China has set the agenda, which includes a discussion of steps to make the world’s economy “interactive, invigorated, interconnected and inclusive.” Generally speaking, various versions of similar objectives have been the goal of these gatherings since the first one convened in 2008 in response to the then-building wo...
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.