Mini-Deal Rationale The details are not complete at this time, but reports indicate that the Trump Administration has reached a partial agreement with the Chinese on a slew of different issues. In exchange for the U.S. not moving forward with additional trade tariffs, China has reportedly agreed to: • Step up agricultural purchases • Improve intellectual property protection • Work to block Fentanyl shipments to the U.S. • Boost energy purchases • Adopt currency manipulation language similar to that in USMCA There are likely other details and China had already moved to eliminate restrictions on foreign ownership in financial services. In the end, each side had its own reasons for reducing trade tensions. For t...
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.