General Comments Starting with overnight trade, it was a rally day for grain and soybean futures with prices reaching impressive gains at their peak. CME wheat was up 11 cents, and KC wheat was 12 cents up at one point. Session highs for corn and soybeans were up 8 cents and 12 cents, respectively. Soymeal was up $9 at its high. Given the absence of something big in the way of news or any changes of note, such a rally during the harvest of a large soybean crop and a record corn crop deserves attention. It would perhaps deserve more attention had prices been able to hold near those highs at the close, but grain and soy futures contracts gave back at least half of their peak gains by the close. Still, with the exception of soyoil, the en...
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.