Markets were over-weight on the Xi – Trump phone call this morning. The phone call went well enough but after it became clear there was no deal on ag or soybeans, the latter turned south. Beans and meal had traded higher overnight and at the open, but like all three wheats, closed on losses. Livestock closed higher and December corn closed fractionally higher but it was the only position to do so. The corn market at least had the hope inspired by a second day of good flash corn sales; it was the third of the week and is intriguingly to unknown. After trading more than 3 percent higher at mid-week on possible sanctions on Russia, petroleum closed pretty much where it started the week on a supply overhang low. This did not h...
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.