Historical Inequality This week President Trump resurrected his contention that a “reciprocal tax” should be imposed that equalizes the tariffs applied by the U.S. on imports with those applied by trading partners on equivalent goods from the United States. Such a move would likely violate U.S. WTO commitments, but it does highlight the inequity of the current global trading rules. President Trump argues that the situation exists because his predecessors were too “lazy” to rebalance the situation. More accurate is that imbalanced tariff rates were acceptable as a post-WWII global economic stimulus policy when the American economy was dominant, but the world has now reached a tipping point that requires a recalibrati...
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.