There’s been a lot of media coverage of inflation since the April consumer price index (CPI) report. Consumer prices rose 0.8 percent in April, the fastest pace in more than a decade. That’s following 0.6 percent in March, and 0.4 percent in February. Combined, on an annualized rate, those three months are on an inflation growth trend of 7.2 percent - the fastest increase since 2008. It wasn’t all bullish commodity markets that pushed up consumer inflation. Energy prices declined 0.1 percent in April while food prices were up 0.4 percent. Instead, it was all the other sectors rebounding from COVID: used cars and trucks were up 10 percent, the largest gain ever since tracking started in 1953. Much of the gain was also push...
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.