Despite high gas prices, the American Automobile Association (AAA) is predicting heavy travel over this long weekend for the 4th of July holiday, forecasting the total to be roughly equal to 2019, prior to COVID. A few factors are at play for increased car travel: after two years of COVID restrictions, people are ready to travel on vacation. Further, the ongoing disruption to airline schedules (with 1,000s of flights cancelled over Memorial Day, Fathers’ Day and Juneteenth weekends) has more people opting to drive, which is also catalyzed by airline fares which are up about 45 percent over pre-pandemic 2019 averages. Finally, with the airline disruptions, people are planning closer to home vacations this weekend, meaning...
Key Market Insights The broad market is locked in on this week’s Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing, but this is no longer just a trade summit. Increasingly, the meeting is becoming tied directly to Iran, energy security, and the growing global economic fallout from disruptions through the Strai...
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.