The polling for the 2024 U.S. Presidential election had significant forecast errors and history will likely judge the numbers as “wrong”. While it’s hard to argue against such judgement when the results proved a historic sweep for Trump versus predictions of a tight race, the pre-election polls must be judged with fairness to the inherent inaccuracies of forecasting future events. What does any of this have to do with acreage numbers, you ask? Only this, that following the election results, WPI offers our first forecast of 2025 U.S. crop plantings, which are likely to suffer from significant forecast errors, just like the election polls (though, hopefully, we are much closer to reality). Before delving into the details of WPI’ for...
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.
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...