The Fed continues to describe inflation as transient but said this week it is prepared to raise interest rates if proven wrong. Several business leaders are certain it is a larger problem than just being transient. Both have compelling narratives, but which is correct? Farmers are complaining about the rising cost of inputs, but they should benefit from elevated commodity prices, assuming the value of the dollar does not work against them. A larger problem would be to have spent on inputs and then have drought wipe out any profits from production. But that is a reason to carry federally subsidized insurance. The current bent towards drought may not be a passing fancy. NOAA’s recent models place a 51 percent chance of a return o...
Key Market Insights Macros: Inflation isn’t cooling — it’s moving higher again. March PCE inflation (Personal Consumption Expenditures index — the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation) rose 0.7 percent month-over-month, pushing the annual rate to 3.5 percent, the h...
An amendment to the U.S. House farm bill, aiming to remove the Save Our Bacon Act language in Section 12006 that would have stripped language to prohibit California’s Proposition 12, Massachusetts’ Question 3, and up to 500 state agricultural laws across the country, was blocked by...
WPI has officially launched Transportation Perspectives as a standalone weekly report separate from our Ag Perspectives articles and analysis. Current Ag Perspectives subscribers will have gratis access to the report through 16 April 2026. Please email us or subscr...
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.