General Comments Markets of every type were somewhat subdued today. The U.S. jobs data was better than expected, with 200,000 jobs reportedly created in December and the unemployment rate dropping from 8.6 percent to 8.5 percent. However, that good news wasn't enough to push financial prices higher. Markets in Asia, Europe and the U.S. were mixed today. The jobs numbers did, however, support the dollar as the euro fell to its lowest level against the dollar since 2010.In the agricultural markets, there were small gains in corn and wheat and small losses in the soy complex. The market must now judge the rain potential every time another weather model is released. These various models are also subject to varying interpretations, depending...
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.