The Biden Administration is reportedly making contingency plans in case rail workers go on strike. Some point out that the President has the power to force workers and the railroads to keep working but announcing contingency planning indicates the intention to accede to the union’s wishes. The President pledged to be “the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen.” This position is risky since it is inflationary, and prices are still rising faster than desired. Food inflation is rising even faster and about 13 percent of rail capacity is used to move agrifood products. Unions striking and disrupting services at the same time most workers are experiencing declining real wages is politically risky. ...
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.