Shutdown The House of Representatives reconvened today with a series of votes scheduled for various appropriations bills aimed at reopening some federal agencies that are closed. The first one is set for tomorrow (9 January) on the Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill, which funds the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) said over the weekend, “This action is necessary so that the American people can receive their tax refunds on schedule.” Yesterday in an apparent pre-emptive effort, however, the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced there would be a partial recall of IRS employees; refunds would be...
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.