The coronavirus spreading out from Wuhan China has supposedly put markets on edge, especially equities. The death toll from the disease is rising but is less than 30 at this juncture. Looking for a proxy situation, the SARS virus back in 2002/03 also started in China and eventually spread to 26 countries, killing a total of 800 people. The data suggest that there is no reason for concern in commodity markets. During the SARS virus outbreak, global consumption of major grains and meats continued on their exact same growth path. This is true for China as well except consumption of wheat had begun its decline whereas soybean demand was at the start of its faster trajectory upward. While the SARS outbreak involved several countrie...
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.