Today’s report that the jobless rate fell in the U.S. was good news that the economy is reviving. Food demand is relatively inelastic, though there can be some changes in quality. If there are impacts, they should be inverse, meaning less money to pay for food should cause food prices to drop. The price of corn going to feed livestock in order to yield more expensive meat shows a greater correlation to unemployment than does wheat going to more direct food use. The announcement of an increase in employment should be bullish for meat and livestock products, as well as other higher priced goods. However, policymakers have flooded the economy with so much extra currency that the impacts may be too subtle to be noticed. Still...
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.