Trade Policy This Week Capitol Hill: Congressional hearings this week on U.S. trade policy under President Trump will offer insights on relative political support or opposition. Republicans in Congress should have held hearings before the trade war was started. Now that it has begun, stopping it requires successful negotiations with trading partners. Simply ending the leverage approach means completely walking away from the objective of better terms of trade. After all, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations with Europe had hit a wall, and Japan insists that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an agreement that Mr. Trump campaigned against, is the only option for the U.S. even as it completes a bilateral fr...
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.