Researchers from Northwestern, Stanford, and the University of Chicago tracked equity market volatility with articles from eleven different newspapers, and they unsurprisingly found that trade policy had no impact on the market prior to the election of Donald Trump (see NBER Working Paper No. 25720). In fact, the researchers’ Equity Volatility Index tracker indicated that news about government policy in general has become more greatly correlated with market volatility since 2017-18. Yet using this same theory and applying it to agricultural commodity futures prices was not as conclusive. As would be expected, commodity prices rose the day that the USMCA was signed and fell the day that President Trump announced higher duties on impor...
What You Need to Know Today: Commodities were mostly lower across the board today after yesterday’s Federal Reserve meeting hinted at a potential interest rate hike later in 2026. The dollar index reached its highest level in over a year, and a strong dollar makes U.S. agricultural expor...
Tomorrow is the Juneteenth federal holiday, and the USDA, along with the rest of the federal government and the CME, will be closed, so the monthly Cattle on Feed report was released a day early. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity on 1 June amounted...
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.