Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's government has been battling deflation and appears to be making some headway, based on its latest release of statistics. The core inflation rate, which like the U.S. excludes food and energy, was up to 0.7 percent in September 2013. This was the fourth month in a row that it has increased. The Consumer Price Index was 1.1 in September. That includes food at a 25 percent weighting with fuel, electricity and water utilities at 7 percent. Generally, deflation has been a problem in Japan since 2009.Indeed, Abe's government is targeting an inflation rate of 2 percent by 2015. Early this year, it started a policy of generating inflation via a loose monetary policy with some fiscal stimulus. Japan's yen...
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.