Brazil's Currency War: The major players shot down Brazil's effort to create teeth in the global trading rules (WTO) for countering intentional currency manipulation by governments. One of the rebuffs is that the issue properly resides in the do-nothing IMF. One problem is that Brazil is hardly an icon of policy probity. Brasilia has used industrial product taxes and now domestic content requirements to limit imports, but remains adamant that it needs policy space to manage its economy against imports. Still, the Rousseff Administration has an opportunity to carry its message to the IMF. The annual meetings of the organization in Washington are typically accompanied by wild-eyed protestors who blame the organization for a litany of silly...
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.
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...