World Perspectives

Long-Term Budget Perspective

Back in October 2010, the Federal Reserve undertook Operation Twist, whereby it sold $400 million in short-term bonds (maturities of three years or less) in order to fund the buying of $400 million long-term bonds (maturities of six years or more). In addition, the Fed would continue to buy mortgage-backed securities. The goal was to flatten the yield curve and lower long-term interest rates. Well, interest rates are down. On Friday, 24 August, the interest on the 10-year Treasury note was 1.68 percent. In July, it had dropped to 1.4 percent. In August 2002, 10 years ago, it was about 4.5 percent, and the rates rose to more than 5 percent in 2007.In July 2011, 10.4 percent of the U.S. debt was in 10-year notes or longer. As of March, the...

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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.

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