In the now fifth U.S. government shutdown in the past 30 years, everyone is guessing about its duration because each shutdown has had its own unique circumstances. The online prediction markets have a range of guesses, all tending toward the shorter side of the last one under Mr. Trump, 35 days back in 2018-19 before he caved. But Mr. Trump is a different president than in his freshman term. Key payments and services to Americans will continue, and the stock market closed higher today despite the government’s closure. The political battle is over controlling the news cycles and thus playing to the hopes or fears of Americans. If it goes badly for the GOP, Republicans could simply (likely forever) remove the use of the fili...
What You Need to Know Today: The Brazilian real surged to start the week after a surprise election result in which right-wing Flavio Bolsonaro won the first round of the election. The swing in the U.S. dollar/Brazilian real (USD/BRL) exchange rate caused soybeans to jump sharply higher in earl...
Key Takeaways: Harvest pressure is fundamentally a timing issue: supply arrives much faster than demand can adjust, creating temporary weakness that can occur across crops and regions. The intensity of that pressure depends less on crop size alone than on how quickly grain moves into the syste...
Pork packer margins closed out September as positive, marking an improvement in a challenging 2026. According to Sterling Marketing, for the week ending 26 September, pork packer margins were $6.98 per head, which is up from a loss of $0.13 the previous week, more than double the margin of $3.9...
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.