EPA has sent the 2014 Required Volume Obligations (RVO) rule to the Office of Management and Budget for review. This rule establishes how much ethanol and biodiesel will be required to be blended into the gasoline supply for 2014. EPA has telegraphed its intentions at least twice now with the first being the proposed 2013 RVO that indicated excess carryover Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs) would help meet the mandate for 2013, but that the situation would be different in 2014. The second time was with the final 2013 RVO that came out quite late on 6 August and stated that it would be difficult to mandate more than 13.2 billion gallons of ethanol for 2014.Of course, the issue is the expanding Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) mandate sp...
As predicted, the Federal Reserve held rates steady at the last meeting before the midterm elections, likely in part because of the election (see WPI 19 October and 22 September). The decision comes at the tail end of a midterm election cycle that has been marked by the two parties campaigning...
Key Takeaways: WPI’s new EU rapeseed crushing margin models point to weaker processing returns over the next four months due to higher rapeseed procurement costs and weaker product values. Statistical forecasts call for German crushing margins to decline from €181/MT to €...
Key Takeaways: The tariff burden rose sharply in 2025 and 2026: the effective rate on imports in HTS Chapters 1–24 increased from 1.53 percent in 2024 to 6.11 percent in 2025, before averaging 5.68 percent in January–August 2026. Headline rates tell only part of the story: exemptio...
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.