President Biden ordered the release of 50 million barrels of crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserves (SPR) to ease gas prices. The release will be in the form of a 32-million-barrel exchange solicitation to be open for bids tomorrow and the accelerating of 18 million-barrel to be sold which were already Congressionally mandated under the authority of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018. If the goal was to lower energy prices – or at least politically to show effort in trying to reign in expensive energy - the announcement may have backfired. Crude oil futures closed up today, as did natural gas and ethanol futures. Ethanol remained unchanged. WTO crude oil futures rose yesterday as well, in anticipation not o...
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
Forecasting developments in production agriculture
On behalf of a private U.S. agricultural technology provider, WPI’s team generated an econometric model to forecast the movement of concentrated corn production north and west from the traditional U.S. Corn Belt. WPI’s model has subsequently provided quantitative support to a multi-million-dollar investment into short-season corn variety development. WPI’s methodology included a series of interviews with regional grain elevators and seed consultants. Emphasizing outreach and communication with stakeholders who possess intimate sectoral knowledge – on-the-ground insights – is a regular component of WPI’s methodologies, made possible by WPI’s ever-growing network of industry contacts.