Sucks at Supplicating Michael Needham of the conservative policy advocacy group Heritage Action says Congress should extend the 2008 Farm Bill for another year in order to give his organization some additional time to work with House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-Oklahoma) in developing a true reform bill. He then admits on a C-SPAN show set to air Sunday that, "For three years, we have been trying to meet with Frank Lucas..." Needham goes on to basically call House Republicans gutless and "such a corporatist party that we won't get rid of the corporate welfare in the farm bill." It seems unlikely that Chairman Lucas will be meeting with Heritage Action anytime soon. Dubious Rationale President Obama cancelled a meeti...
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: 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...
Markets are getting into the Halloween spirit, handing out more tricks than treats. There has been some encouraging news, but it hasn’t been enough to slow the broader slide. Now buyers need to show up with something other than another “Charlie Brown” rock for the bag. Somethi...
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.