Gasoline prices always are a key factor in politics each summer, starting from Memorial Day in May, through the busy summer driving and vacation season, to Labor Day in early September. This will be especially so this year as Congress debates biofuels policy and other energy issues. These include the Keystone XL pipeline, the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) proposed rule on reducing sulfur emissions, and the federal budget, which has many petroleum industry tax provisions on the table. Thus, it is worth a look at what the Department of Energy is predicting for summer gasoline prices.According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), both gasoline and diesel prices are down. The average retail price of regular gasoline acros...
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: 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 €...
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.