U.S. – China Rift There is a split within Washington policy circles over the continuation of Donald Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods. Backing the Senate position, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called for reducing the tariffs and White House Deputy National Security Advisor Daleep Singh said they “serve no strategic purpose.” Meanwhile, USTR Katherine Tai backs the House position that the tariffs provide negotiating leverage. As former Senator and Ambassador to China Max Baucus used to say, leverage is all that matters in trade negotiations. One side says eliminating the tariffs will attack inflation; the other side says they do not and instead keep the U.S. dependent on the Chinese supply chain. The want to elimin...
What You Need to Know Today: The U.S. and Iran resumed missile strikes after a brief pause in fighting, raising concerns that the five-month conflict could expand across the Middle East. Jordan intercepted Iranian missiles, Kuwait reported a fatal strike, and drone attacks damaged two natural...
The Senate Agriculture Committee will take up the farm bill next week, and a number of amendments targeting the meat industry are expected to be offered. Two of the most potentially damaging are the Schumer amendment, based on his bill, the Family Grocery and Farmer Relief Act, and mandatory co...
Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village, published in 1770, is of a timeless quality. It is a 425-line lament for a disappearing rural world, where prosperous villages give way to larger estates, fewer farmers, and emigration. One passage even follows those leaving for the new colony of Georgia...
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.