Analysts see a 20 percent (-4 MMT) downgrade in Australia’s wheat production possibly in this week’s WASDE report, and rising expectations that Russia’s production may be off a bit. Wheat prices have been firming on the board as a result. Still, global stocks are large. The stocks to use ratio is a standard metric for considering the value of wheat and while they correlate, they are not perfect. There tends to be an over-reaction in price or tail effect when stocks look to be tighter, as in 2007 and 2012 (see graph below). If the same over-reaction were to occur when stocks are larger than deemed necessary, the current price would be lower than it is currently. However, there is always a stronger reaction to fear of...
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: President Trump suspended the planned attacks on Iran and announced that the pieces for a framework for peace were in place in a weekend social media post. Iran, however, later said no efforts were underway to conduct negotiations with the U.S., though Oman indicat...
Developer's Note: Last year, users pointed out differences between the 5-year averages reported in this app and what USDA estimates in its weekly report. The difference exists because WPI calculates average based on the last 5 years of observations for the current week. In cases where obs...