General Comments G7 finance and banking officials held a conference call to discuss the eurozone's debt and banking problems. Results from the call, if any, were not reported, but if one conference call could resolve the most effective ways in which governments could address the crisis, it would have been done two years ago. Germany still resists the concept of euro bonds, but it does not offer much in the way of constructive alternatives. Spanish borrowing costs fell just slightly, but they remain over 6 percent.However, there was a bit of a pause in the stream of bad news which allowed equity markets to take a breather and grain markets to get back to their own issues. Both equity and commodity indexes have taken a real beating during...
Key Takeaways: President Trump announced $8 billion in additional agricultural assistance through the Harvest Fuel Relief Program, as USDA projects farm fuel and oil expenses will increase 28.8 percent in 2026. The package follows $12 billion in earlier relief, while government farm payments w...
Key Takeaways: A student group from the University of Chicago is protesting to bring back onion futures trading. Trading in onion futures was banned in 1958 following a spectacular bout of market manipulation that resulted in a corner of the physical market. The ban on onion futures led t...
Beef packer margins deteriorated to $141/head last week, down $55 from the prior week as fed cattle prices strengthened while the Choice cutout remained nearly unchanged. The cutout held near $373/cwt while fed cattle prices climbed $4/cwt to $224/cwt, narrowing processor profits. Despite the d...
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.