President Trump walked back some of his statements regarding China over the weekend, which allowed ag markets to breathe more easily this week. Soybeans and soyoil managed to post small gains to start the week after Friday’s trade-war-news-induced collapse, with traders turning hopeful the U.S. and China can come to a resolution soon. Some of that optimism came from the Trump administration directly, as U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent said there were meaningful talks with China over the weekend and that he expects more meetings in the coming weeks. Despite that news, however, corn and wheat futures settled in the red as large supply expectations continue to weigh on trader sentiment. Wheat futures hit fresh contract lows amid increasi...
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.