Brazilian presidential candidate Marina Silva is an environmentalist in a highly protectionist country, and yet she appears ready to break the mold on her nation's trade policy if elected. Yen and TPP The publicly reported lack of progress this week between Japan and the U.S. on Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) market access negotiations was related more to timing than actual inflexibility. Still, the most interesting insight was in a Financial Times piece that notes the adverse impact of a Japanese currency that is now at a six-year low against the U.S. dollar. Historically, Tokyo has sought a weak yen to boost exports, but the economy has changed due to factories moved to other countries and increased U.S. dollar-denominated oil imports...
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.