Market Trends A Tale of Two Years With the shutdown of the U.S. government over (at least temporarily), its official statistics are now available to the general public for analysis. Similarly, China’s curtailment of the widespread distribution of official data, the result of a crackdown on consultancies and independent market analysts who routinely challenge the central government’s assumptions, has slowed releases of information. However, more official figures have come out in the past several weeks. The combined sources show just how dramatic an effect the trade war has had on the composition of China’s agricultural imports from the U.S. over the course of 2018. For example, according to data from USDA’s Global A...
Key Takeaways: Total U.S. crop acres (excluding hay) are forecast to expand fractionally this year due to greater oilseed crop and winter wheat plantings. One of the key drivers of this year’s crop outlook is input costs, and crops with a lower cost profile have an advantage in producers...
Soybeans Market Overview After many weeks of almost no activity in Brazil and little activity in the U.S., this week kicked off with a lot of activity in the U.S. soybean market. Once again, the sole buyer was Sinograin/Cofco, acting on behalf of the Chinese Federal Reserve, which purchased a t...
What You Need to Know Today: Crude oil prices extended their rally today, supported by several developments, including escalating Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabian oil infrastructure and growing concerns about supply disruptions. The Trump administration is reportedly preparing to remove 50 perc...
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.