The world's financial markets have been embroiled in the Greek and eurozone debt issues since last summer. Markets fly higher one day based on "positive" news from Greece and collapse the next, when the "positive" news from the previous day doesn't materialize. This week's action in financial markets, more or less mirrored in commodity markets, was a classic example of this good news, bad news flopping around. Currency valuations have also been extremely volatile, with the dollar showing huge gains throughout most of the months since last August. The chart below shows the dollar index from last August when the euro mess initially hit the headlines in a major way.The price charts for corn, wheat and soybeans during this same period have al...
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...
Key Market Insights Geopolitical Limbo: Geopolitical risk remained a key driver across global commodity markets today. President Trump stated that the Iran memorandum of understanding is not yet final and warned that military action could resume if negotiations fail. Both sides continue w...
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.