One Year Balancing Act Favorable numbers for Wall Street and the unemployment rate are two metrics Donald Trump needs to win reelection. Employment has not waivered yet and while the trade war with China has the Dow Industrial Average off 5 percent from its peak, it is still 15 percent higher from its trough back in December. The Trump reelection campaign is gambling that if the economic costs of the war are kept limited, they will contrast this President’s get-tough approach with China against the opposition’s suggestion that America back off and thus capitulate. They will argue that China has been stealing, and failure to force better behavior will then be granting Beijing a license to steal. However, if he miscalculates his...
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.