The People’s Bank of China tried to use a more market-oriented approach to tying the value of the yuan to the U.S. dollar, but that is changing. Transatlantic Discussions NATO members – read Europe’s members – were reportedly stone-faced as Donald Trump chastised the majority of them for failing to meet their financial commitments to the alliance. The media then tried to turn the table by highlighting Trump’s failure to reassert the U.S. commitment to the NATO defense pledge, which states that an attack on one member is an attack on the alliance. The White House answered by saying the pledge doesn’t require constant reiteration to be true.The administration could have added that a Pew Research Center Global Attitudes survey shows that mor...
What You Need to Know Today: A third U.S. border crossing (Columbus, New Mexico) has reopened to Mexican cattle imports following nearly two years of restrictions related to New World screwworm. The reopening could gradually improve feeder cattle availability, although more than 60 confi...
Yesterday, the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) released a new report of negotiated cash purchases of cattle under the mandatory price report. The report included Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas. The goal of the report was to solve the confidentiality issues e...
Key Takeaways: U.S. soybean crushing began in 1911 and saw its most rapid expansion during the 1930s amid the broader agricultural and technology revolutions of the time. After peaking in the early 2000s, the soybean crushing industry went through a downturn as poor crush margins forced...
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.