Inflation Trumps Trade Policy USTR Katherine Tai threw in the towel this week and conceded that reducing tariffs on Chinese goods is among the Biden Administration’s policy options. She qualified that this is true as long as it does not undermine longer-term efforts to encourage China to end unfair trade practices, but in the end her effort to maintain leverage over China lost out to the White House goal of lowering inflation. The tariffs imposed by former President Trump were called a trade policy “gift” to the Biden Administration, but they seem unlikely to be resumed even when the inflationary pressures subside. Grain but not Freedom Agriculture Minister Cem Özdemir says Germany will help get grain exported out...
Key Market Insights The broad market is locked in on this week’s Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing, but this is no longer just a trade summit. Increasingly, the meeting is becoming tied directly to Iran, energy security, and the growing global economic fallout from disruptions through the Strai...
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.