As has been well documented in the news over the past week, the Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) kept the federal funds rate unchanged on 1 November. This comes after the September meeting when the FOMC had initially signaled there would be one more rate hike this year. The Fed also opted not to raise rates in September. The question is, will July 2023 be the last rate hike of this tightening? The decision came after the sky high Q3 GDP growth of 4.9 percent. But there is more behind the curtain regarding that report. First, it was driven by consumer spending. In fact, much of that spending was on services, and within that, the Barbie movie and Taylor Swift and Beyonce’s concert tours. That doesn&rsq...
What You Need to Know Today: Russia rejected calls for a ceasefire in the Black Sea, including a proposal to halt attacks on civilian shipping that could help restore grain flows from Ukrainian ports. Tyson Foods announced plans to permanently close its Joslin, Illinois, beef processing facili...
The big news in the cattle markets yesterday was Tyson Foods’ move to close two more beef plants. One of them, the Joslin, Illinois, plant was shuttered immediately after the announcement. The other, in Eagle Mountain, Utah, is a case-ready plant that does not slaughter cattle. Tyson also...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on Wednesday. In July, the CPI rose 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted, and rose 3.4 percent over the last 12 months, not seasonally adjusted. The index for all items less food and energy, or the “core” infla...
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.