Ministers meeting in Bali on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade negotiations made a very strong and hopeful statement that negotiators would "now proceed to resolve all outstanding issues with the objective of completing this year..." As opined earlier (see Ag Perspectives 3 October), completing TPP before President Obama has acquired Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) from the Congress would be hazardous. This reinforces the likelihood of TPA being encompassed in a grand bargain since it is unlikely to be accomplished as standalone legislation, and certainly not if all comity is lost in the Congress because one party or the other feels stilted by the outcome of the current standoff in Washington.Less hopeful is future growth in agricul...
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.