After nominating new State, Treasury and Defense secretaries for his second term, President Obama today named three new picks for cabinet officials: Gina McCarthy for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Ernest Moniz for the Department of Energy (DOE), and Sylvia Burwell for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The following is a brief look at the three candidates.EPA: McCarthy is currently the assistant administrator for air pollution at the EPA. She and current Deputy Administrator Bob Perciasepe were the two leading candidates to replace former EPA chief Lisa Jackson, but McCarthy may have gotten the final nod because of the email scandal surrounding both Jackson and Perciasepe. McCarthy has been the head of the clean air o...
Yesterday, Alberta held a referendum on whether to begin the process toward independence from Canada. With more than one million votes counted as of early Tuesday morning, around 77 percent supported remaining in Canada, and 23 percent voted to start the process of separation, according to unof...
Key Takeaways: India is excluding sugarcane juice, sugar syrup, and B-heavy molasses from its 2026/27 fuel ethanol procurement program to protect domestic sugar supplies, potentially shifting additional demand toward corn and rice. India’s corn consumption for ethanol has surged from jus...
Last week, September inflation reports showed that the Producer Price Index rose 1.3 percent, far ahead of the 0.6 percent consensus expectation, while the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 0.6 percent, in line with expectations. However, September also marked the 66th consecutive month that both...
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.