East and Gulf Coast port workers are back on the job today after striking on 1 October. Many of the affected ports will add weekend overtime hours to load trucks; several ports will remain closed to trucks today as containers are offloaded to prepared for resumptions of trucking. Importers report being invoiced for port congestion fees by the shipping companies, but in the end, the work stoppage was short enough that the economic ramifications will be limited, for now. The deal is temporary, with the strike suspended until 15 January after the ports offered wage increases of $4 per hour immediately on top of the $39 per hour base, and an additional $4 per hour for the remainder of the six-year master contract. That is a total i...
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.