Russian President Vladimir Putin complains that NATO is a threat to Russia and seeks a buffer to establish states but the nations he wants to isolate from the west are all more frightened of Russian authority. Russia is literally driving the buffer states to want to join NATO. Similarly, the more that President Xi Jinping cracks down on the Chinese people, the less other nations want to see the ascendency of China. The west is not perfect in this backdrop. Eastern European nations want to join NATO, but NATO is only as strong as its weakest links. Too many NATO members are free riders when it comes to the expenditures necessary to make the alliance powerful. While China and Russia appear to be coordinating efforts at disrupting the w...
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.