As the U.S. and China reportedly near the conclusion of bilateral trade negotiations, Trump administration officials are turning their focus to Japan, though in somewhat unhelpful ways. Perhaps anxious to placate farmers who have borne the adverse brunt of the president’s trade wars and Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) withdrawal, USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue said maybe agriculture would be the focus in the first phase of negotiations with Tokyo. However, leading with Japan’s most defensive issue is unlikely to bear the best result for American farmers. Preferably, a negotiator builds a stack of deliverables to the other side in order to build a position for making demands. Then National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow spe...
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
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.