The Senate tomorrow returns from its Memorial Day recess for floor business. It is scheduled to hold a procedural vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act, a women's pay equity bill intended to highlight political issues before the election. After that, the Senate will likely take up the farm bill, one of the few bipartisan efforts that the Senate or Congress as a whole has crafted this year.The farm bill is likely to be challenged by a number of amendments, as we have previously noted, and could be on the floor for weeks. The goal is final passage by the Independence Day recess (4 July). That would pressure the House to take up the measure after returning from recess. There could be a lot of amendments in the House because the bill is likely to b...
What You Need to Know Today: Cattle futures extended their sharp selloff Friday as weakening cash cattle prices, deteriorating feedlot profitability, and reduced packer demand continued to weigh on the market. The inability of futures to sustain a rally following last week's bullish Cattle on...
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...
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.