Many were hopeful that last Friday’s actions to reopen the U.S. government plus some optimism that this week’s meeting with China will go well would have a positive impact on agricultural and equity markets, but just the opposite happened. Wheat, corn and soybean markets were lower overnight and today with soybean futures down as much as a dime at one point. U.S. equity markets were also sharply lower, and crude oil was down more than $2.00/barrel. The worries today were that the odds of another partial U.S. government shutdown on 15 February are still 50/50. There were also some poor earnings reports, notably by Caterpillar. Most of the central and eastern U.S. will have record or near-record cold temperatures this week. Overn...
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.