Global rules for liberalized trade such as the Uruguay Round depended upon strong U.S. leadership backed by the EU. The number of countercurrents to any return to that model are now overwhelming. China has mimicked the U.S. in using economic hostage taking to leverage more nativistic outcomes. Both the U.S. and China are headed toward a more kinetic conflict as China expands its military capacity and uses it in the South China Sea. Russian President Vladimir Putin is no free trader and he just won the right to rule his country for another 16 years. No matter who succeeds Angela Merkel in Europe, or Donald Trump in the U.S., or the WTO in Geneva, there is no end to the bear market in agriculture based on expanding global demand and fr...
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.