A rate hike resulting from this week’s Federal Reserve meeting is almost a foregone conclusion, but there is more to look for from the Fed’s actions.It will be a busy week for central banks with the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank meeting tomorrow through Wednesday and the Bank of Japan (BOJ) as well as Bank of England also holding meetings this week.The Bank of England is expected to let interest rates remain at 0.25 percent, the same level as the U.S. federal funds rate from 2008 to December 2015. Part of the reasoning behind this expectation is that the U.K. federal budget provided for only UK£3 billion in stimulus funds, an amount widely considered to be insufficient given the state of the economy. Indeed, the economy there is still reeling f...
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.