Sino-American Trade War II U.S. President Donald Trump says he will impose tariffs on an additional $200 billion worth of imports from China, perhaps this week. He is tempering his attack by cutting the tariffs from an earlier 25 percent to just 10 percent. The Chinese have responded by saying they may back out of bilateral negotiations intended to end the war and, lacking sufficient imports from America against which to counter-retaliate, Beijing will instead restrict the export of items needed in the supply chain by U.S. manufacturers. Undermining China Taiwan went through its regularly scheduled WTO trade policy review last week, but it did something quite irregular – it committed not to claim special and differential tr...
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.