Planes, Trains and Automobiles Part of the focus on China pertains to the extent that the government controls the means of commerce. It is pervasive to be sure with more than a third of all business activity there estimated to be under such control. However, China is not alone. Western governments own airplane makers, trains, automobile companies, utilities, etc. State-owned broadcasting is common, and what isn’t owned outright can be tightly regulated. The one argument that recently prevented the abolishment of the U.S.-owned Export Import Bank was that it helped American companies compete against financing by foreign governments. If there is going to be a debate over state-owned enterprises, it should not be limited to China. &nbs...
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.