General Comments It was an outside down day for the soy complex, but the technically oversold corn and wheat markets finally found some support and managed to break their long losing streak. All of this occurred in the absence of anything particularly new and/or exciting.Markets are always about hope and fear, and both of these emotions were evident in today's price action. Soybean futures prices fell on fears that good early season weather conditions in Brazil, and now in Argentina, will improve soy crop prospects. The market also fears a slowdown in Chinese buying interest for U.S. soybeans, even though it must be obvious that China's torrid buying pace must taper off.Conversely, some hope was being expressed that perhaps these lower...
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.