The Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee (FMOC) was scheduled to meet on Wednesday of this week, but for the second time it took emergency action prior to the meeting. On Sunday, Chairman Jerome Powell announced a 100 basis point cut to the federal fund rate. This comes after the Fed announced an emergency 50 basis point rate cut on 3 March. That puts the rate in the range of 0 to 0.25 percent, to where it was lowered in 2008 and stayed until the end of 2015. In his statement Powell generally ruled out negative interest rates like Japan and Europe have had. Back in the fall of 2019, President Trump tweeted several times that the Fed should adopt negative interest rates, or at least get down to zero rates so that the...
What You Need to Know Today: It was just one of those days where seemingly everything was in the red as part of a broader risk-off economic sentiment amid de-escalation headlines in the Middle East. Other key fundamentals were also bearish, including the resumption of Mexican cattle imports an...
Key Takeaways: U.S. cow-calf producers are facing another year of record-breaking revenues and net returns for 2026, though rising cost pressures and pullbacks in cattle prices increase risks. Drought remains a key concern for much of the cow-calf industry this year, with rising feed cos...
USDA announced on Friday the coordinated, phased reopening of southern U.S.-Mexico livestock ports starting 24 August 2026, after more than a year of closures due to the spread of New World screwworm (NWS). Douglas, Arizona, will be the first port of entry to resume cattle trade on 24 August. T...
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.