Tokyo Challenges Beijing: While the EU has been reluctant to join a trade war with the U.S. against China, Japan’s Shinzō Abe appears to have sided with Washington. First, he supported a G7 statement against Beijing’s new controls over Hong Kong and now he has offered the island’s financial sector workers a refuge. Tensions across the East China Sea are likely to rise. Trade Policy Agenda: USTR Robert Lighthizer appears before the two top trade committees of the U.S. Congress next week to discuss his Office’s agenda for the rest of the year. After an op-ed article last week that sounded more like the Democratic Party than his own, Congressional Democrats may be previewing how their Party’s presumptive pr...
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.