Clearly, the CFTC is having difficulty fitting commercial hedging practices and the long-standing hedging exemption for grain markets into its proposed new regimen of position limits.Since "excessive speculation" (never defined) in derivative markets was fingered as a root cause of the 2008 commodity market crash, the financial market crisis and the ensuing Great Recession of 2009, the congressional composers of the massive Dodd-Frank financial market reform legislation of 2010 wanted to be seen as addressing this problem. Thus, language was included in Dodd-Frank that seemed to encourage, if not actually require, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to establish limits on the size of positions that noncommercial speculators coul...
What You Need to Know Today: Chinese purchases of U.S. soybeans continued to accelerate, with USDA reporting another 558 KMT sold to China and 236 KMT to unknown destinations. Combined with sales announced Wednesday and Thursday, the latest purchases bring the three-day total to approximately...
Key Takeaways: With the fall calf run now upon us, producers are finally getting a glimpse of what their realized profits will be for 2026. Some producers may have already obtained a strong estimate of 2026 revenues, especially if calves were forward sold in, for example, the mid-summer...
As fall begins, wild migratory birds are starting their seasonal migration. That has the industry and government officials worried about the potential spread, again, of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI). Some members of Congress have called for the United States to be prepared for a pote...
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.