Tai’s Easy Day Katherine Tai’s nomination hearing before the Senate Finance Committee today was all polite ceremony. Her thoughtful and respectful approach easily winning an eventual lopsided confirmation vote. She was not asked about trade deficits or pressed into any corners. Committee members concurrently praised her predecessor, Robert Lighthizer, while criticizing Trump trade policy. Yet, Trump trade policy continues with lots of tariffs and no TPP. The one common denominator was the need to be aggressive on China. Europhiles on the Potomac Washington’s recovery from Trump is moving faster than its recovery from COVID. There are nearly 70 different think tanks in the city and more than a few have been holding...
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.