It's budget week in Washington, and a number of fiscal policy matters will be highlighted. These include a plan to minimize the sequester's impact on farm payments, the president's FY 2014 budget proposal, and a reaction to former Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director David Stockman's op-ed in The New York Times. Let's take a look at them in reverse order, from the broad to the specific, starting with Stockman's comments to set the stage for the budget debate.David Stockman, of course, was a House member from Michigan and President Reagan's OMB director, famous for the "magic asterisk" in fudging budget numbers and for pushing what came to be known as "trickledown economics." He's written another book, "The Great Deformation: The...
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...
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.