Regional Updates: Mediterranean/Middle East Comments: The Turkish lira’s drop is forecasted to push up inflation in Turkey by as much as 20 percent in 2018/19. Qatar has promised investments of up to $15 billion to help support the Turkish economy. Turkey is blaming most of its problems on the U.S. and says that the U.S. is waging an “economic war” against Turkey. The falling lira could cause a banking crisis affecting several EU banks which hold a good deal of Turkish private sector debt. Turkey is a major importer of wheat, corn, barley, corn by-products, oilseeds and oilseed meals and any banking crisis will certainly hit these imports. Officials of Iran, Afghanistan and India will be meeting in Kabul in...
What You Need to Know Today: Russia rejected calls for a ceasefire in the Black Sea, including a proposal to halt attacks on civilian shipping that could help restore grain flows from Ukrainian ports. Tyson Foods announced plans to permanently close its Joslin, Illinois, beef processing facili...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on Wednesday. In July, the CPI rose 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted, and rose 3.4 percent over the last 12 months, not seasonally adjusted. The index for all items less food and energy, or the “core” infla...
We have described the long-term investment climate in crop and livestock production, using data primarily from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). The data provided background on the current investment climate and outlook for agricultural capital formation. Our conclusion was that investment...
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.