General Comments Most financial and commodity markets enthusiastically greeted the Congress's passage of a last minute fix that avoids (at least for now) the scheduled double whammy of tax increases and government spending cuts. We will not repeat the details here since they have been covered ad nauseum by the media. Suffice it to say that the agreement postpones the hard decisions about tax policy, spending, entitlements and the budget deficit. In fact, the agreement will actually increase the deficit in FY 2013. The next round probably will occur when the Obama Administration is forced to seek more borrowing authority in a few months.The enthusiasm over the agreement was probably more a sigh of relief than anything else. Nevertheless,...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. weather is getting more attention this week as conditions vary greatly across the western, central, and eastern corn belts, with the different regions battling dryness and too much rain simultaneously. The ProFarmer Crop Tour began today in Indiana and Nebrask...
Key Takeaways: Argentina is on pace for a record corn crop and record exports in the current marketing year, with abundant supplies likely to keep the country highly competitive in global export markets. Argentina’s record exportable surplus is allowing it to offer highly competitive pri...
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.