General Comments In a mild surprise, the Fed's Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) decided not to ease back its quantitative easing (QE) program of buying $85 billion worth of Treasury bonds and mortgage securities each month, since U.S. economic growth remains disappointedly slow. In fact, the Fed has lowered (again) its estimate of GDP growth in 2013 to 2-2.3 percent, down 0.3 percent from its last estimate. It also lowered its range of projected growth in 2014 to 2.9-3.1 percent, down from 3-3.5 percent. The Fed's projections of U.S. economic growth have been consistently too optimistic since recovery from the recession began in 2009. We suppose that is another way of saying that the Fed has consistently over-estimated the impa...
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.