Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe was out of the bromance embrace of Donald Trump when his finance minister, Taro Aso, let the truth slip about currency manipulation. TEA not BAT U.S. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-TX) reportedly said, “I’ve not yet heard a valid complaint that can’t be resolved in a very positive way through the design and transition of these provisions.” He was referring to what House Republicans have called a “border adjustment tax” (BAT). One valid complaint is that it will hurt U.S. importers, retailers and consumers. However, the larger problem has nothing to do with design or transition but rather poor marketing. Republicans have historically railed against raising a “tax,” and a “border ad...
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.