Economic Risks Rise Chinese President Xi Jinping gives assurances that the coronavirus will be managed and that it will not hobble the economy, but finance officials elsewhere are amply worried. Agriculture is highly dependent on growing economies to expand demand at least fast enough to keep partial pace with higher productivity. The Chinese economy will clearly take a hit in first quarter 2020 and other economies already burdened by the trade war fallout face some drag from the coronavirus. Euro-area industrial output was down 2.1 percent in December, the sharpest fall in four years and some major components border on recession. The cornoavirus is expected to add a 0.1 to 0.2 percent decline in GDP growth this quarter. Wall Street...
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.