Disagree on the Disagreement From the U.S. perspective, its goals for a trade agreement with China have been clear all along, and it was Beijing that backtracked when it deleted nearly a third of the 150-page draft document. From the perspective of China, it is Washington that has been untrustworthy, and it added provisions that resulted in an “unequal treaty.” Since there is currently an imbalance of trade concessions in China’s favor, an effort to better balance them inherently means an unequal document. The larger concern is the slipping away of momentum. President Xi Jinping warns that the U.S. is attempting to force its version of civilization on China. Beijing-based Pang Zhongying at Renmin University believes 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...
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.