The U.S. Senate passed an infrastructure investment package today, a prerequisite by the Biden Administration before Washington will again reduced barriers to trade. However, conditioning freer trade on this infrastructure package could end up being a drag on the economy. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated yesterday that “we must first make a generational investment in our own competitiveness” before any new trade deals. He cited the fact that China has been investing three times as much on infrastructure as the U.S. but like waiting for investment to trade, there is a certain shallowness to the proposition. China has three times the number of people and due to decades of Maoism, it has been scramblin...
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.