Transatlanticism The World Economic Forum in Davos this week brought to the fore some major trade issues between the U.S. and Europe. First, French President Emmanuel Macron delayed his country’s imposition of a digital tax until the end of the year in hopes that the OECD negotiation process can arrive at a common global policy by that time. President Trump’s threat to impose more tariffs on French products already stung by the retaliatory tariffs in the Airbus case likely aided the decision-making. Meanwhile, President Trump revealed his hand while meeting with European Commissioner President Ursula Von der Leyen. He acknowledged her reputation as a negotiator and then forewarned her that, “we’re going to talk abo...
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.