Predictable Trade War After the Shanghai Composite Index plunged in value, the headlines say that the Chinese were “caught off guard” by President Trump’s announcement of counter-retaliatory tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese exports. Wall Street was also supposedly surprised by the move. There are smart people in the Chinese government, on Wall Street and in Shanghai. Donald Trump’s trade war strategy has been clear as day from the beginning. Perhaps it is just the reporters in the media who don’t get what is going on. China will then respond in kind and on and on – that is the way the tit for tat of a trade war proceeds until there is a peace agreement. Some speculate that China will turn its consumer...
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.