Misdiagnosed U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said this week that, “Higher food and energy prices are having stagflationary effects, namely depressing output and spending and raising inflation all around the world.” She pushed for increased international food aid and advised international financial institutions to address acute food shortages. Stagflation is not depressing food output – war and weather are the culprits. It also is not to blame in energy markets, where war, monopolistic OPEC practices, and Western discouragement of fossil fuels are to blame. Such misdiagnoses risk the wrong policy responses to address the root causes. Potemkin Trade Policy In a few days, President Biden will announce the...
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.