Dollars versus Disease Part of the debate over action against the coronavirus has always been health versus economics. The decision to err on the side of health and impose stay-at-home orders was not predicated on a cold, hard risk-benefit analysis but on politics. Politicians understandably do not want to get blamed for people dying. There are policy tools to address the economic fallout until there are treatments to address COVID-19. The U.S. government may handout $50 billion to the agriculture sector during 2018-2020 to offset the impacts of the trade war and now the virus. As a result, farmland prices are holding up and agricultural banks are still financially strong. However, the average person will grow weary of the long-term econom...
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.