U.S. House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s surprise visit to Taiwan kept the CBOT on the defensive Tuesday amid a lack of other fundamental news. China has not received the Speaker’s visit well at all and even issued a thinly veiled threat that it might shoot down her plane. That didn’t happen, fortunately, but China did respond with a military show of force. The concern for the grain markets, of course, is that a political battle – whether or not involving military assets – between the U.S. and China will likely involve the grain trade. Then there’s the broader issue that markets simply don’t like uncertainties and traders typically adopt a “sell first, ask questions later” attitude in m...
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.