The series of White House meetings on an administrative fix to the costs of Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs), which began in December 2017, will continue. This is despite the drop in 2018 D6 ethanol RIN prices to $0.32-0.34 this week versus around $0.70 in January. RINs for 2017 have been trading at a $0.05-0.06 discount. The upcoming confab will include all the key players from the Senate: biofuels advocates Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who want to lower compliance costs of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) and RIN prices through an expansion of E15, and refinery champions Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Pat Toomey (R-Pennsylvania). For those keeping score, the doubles team of Cruz and Toomey are ahead so far; the admi...
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 big news in the cattle markets yesterday was Tyson Foods’ move to close two more beef plants. One of them, the Joslin, Illinois, plant was shuttered immediately after the announcement. The other, in Eagle Mountain, Utah, is a case-ready plant that does not slaughter cattle. Tyson also...
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...
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.