Trade wars invariably involve government actions intended to impede, punish or prevent imports and exports of goods between two or more countries. The most common ammunition used by participants is the imposition of higher tariffs and/or surcharges on either imports of specific items or on an across-the-board basis. Such disputes were relatively common during the 19th century when trade was viewed as a government-sponsored competition between or among nations. Perhaps the most famous trade war occurred in 1930 when the U.S. Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Act. It raised U.S. tariffs on imports of more than 20,000 items to the highest level since the 1820s after they had already been increased in 1922. Many countries responded by raising t...
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.