Uglier with a Smile President-Elect Joe Biden says he wants to normalize U.S. diplomacy following his predecessor’s bull in the china closet approach but there will still be an ugly side to it. The next chief executive already says he will not immediately remove Mr. Trump’s punitive tariffs against China. Even harsher ideas came out this week from the U.S. – China Economic and Security Review Commission. That body emphasized retaining the tariffs until some other forms of leverage can be found and recommended adding a slew of other provocative policies. Most controversial would involve sending a PAS (presidentially appointed, Senate confirmed) official to Taiwan. The Commission includes Michael Wessell, a labor expert als...
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.