World Perspectives

OPEC Cuts Quotas to Match Actual Production and Establish Price Floor

On Sunday, OPEC + announced voluntary cuts in oil production that will amount to 1.657 million barrels per day (bpd). Saudi Arabia, Russia, Algeria, Gabon, Iraq, Kuwait, the UAE, Oman, and Kazakhstan are all planning on production cutbacks starting in May and are planned for the remainder of 2023. The announcement came as a surprise the day before OPEC members were scheduled to meet in Vienna.

Yesterday’s announcement comes on top of a previous production cutback of 2 million bpd in October 2022. At the time, Saudi Arabia explained the reason for the 2 million bpd cut as a response to stabilize oil prices against a weaker global economy and increasing interest rates in western countries that had implications for economic growth and...

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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.

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