The Federal Open Market Committee moved to raise the federal funds rate at its most recent meeting, but everything else remained status quo.Following up on last week’s preview of the Federal Open Market Committee’s March meeting (see Ag Perspectives, 13 March), the federal funds rate was indeed increased to a range of 0.75-1 percent. The outlook discussed also did not change as three still seems to be the magic number in terms of rate increases this year, ultimately setting the federal funds rate at a band of 1.25-1.5 percent. Note, however, that the odds of a fourth rate hike are greater than a limit of just two.As for the Fed’s outlook for the economy, not much changed there either.The post meeting notes did state, “The Committee will car...
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.