Waiting for Trade Policy Changes Seasoned Washington trade policy expert Bill Reinsch characterized the Biden Administration’s trade policy as akin to Grigory Potemkin’s fake villages erected for Catherine the Great. Basically hollow. Uruguayan Ambassador Andrés Durán Hareau has an answer. He suggested the traditional quid pro quo whereby Western Hemisphere countries, including the U.S., lower their barriers to imports. He said that is what is necessary to give President Biden’s proposed Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity some teeth. However, Reinsch says the current course for American trade policy is unlikely to change until after the 2024 elections. Transatlantic Speech A U.S. federal ju...
What You Need to Know Today: Russia rejected calls for a ceasefire in the Black Sea, including a proposal to halt attacks on civilian shipping that could help restore grain flows from Ukrainian ports. Tyson Foods announced plans to permanently close its Joslin, Illinois, beef processing facili...
The big news in the cattle markets yesterday was Tyson Foods’ move to close two more beef plants. One of them, the Joslin, Illinois, plant was shuttered immediately after the announcement. The other, in Eagle Mountain, Utah, is a case-ready plant that does not slaughter cattle. Tyson also...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on Wednesday. In July, the CPI rose 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted, and rose 3.4 percent over the last 12 months, not seasonally adjusted. The index for all items less food and energy, or the “core” infla...
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.