State of the Union (SOTU) addresses are often eloquent speeches that rarely do more than bolster supporters and irritate detractors. Last night's version by President Obama was no exception, but read on anyway! For aggies and trade, the one substantive contribution was the president placing the official imprimatur on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the European Union. Confidence remains low that it will significantly lower regulatory barriers, but those will be a highline focus in the negotiations. And this initiative comes from a President who campaigned in 2008 very skeptically about free trade agreements.Most of the rest of the economic components of his presentation are likely negligible in effect. Some aggies wo...
Yesterday, Alberta held a referendum on whether to begin the process toward independence from Canada. With more than one million votes counted as of early Tuesday morning, around 77 percent supported remaining in Canada, and 23 percent voted to start the process of separation, according to unof...
Last week, September inflation reports showed that the Producer Price Index rose 1.3 percent, far ahead of the 0.6 percent consensus expectation, while the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 0.6 percent, in line with expectations. However, September also marked the 66th consecutive month that both...
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.