USMCA to the Fore The Trump administration’s lifting of tariffs on aluminum and steel from Canada and Mexico has moved consideration of the USMCA agreement to the fore but not without some remaining challenges. The U.S. House Ways and Means Committee holds a hearing this Wednesday on the enforcement provisions of the agreement, a specific focus of concern for Democrats. There will be no government witnesses. Instead, the committee will hear from organized labor, environmentalists, an agribusiness representative and a former congressional staffer with experience in trade agreements. The witnesses are reflective of areas of concern, but perhaps not all are completely lacking in bias. The outcome is likely to increase the committee&rsqu...
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.