Summary:
Cattle ranchers respond with first-takes on proposed policies from White House
Tuesday: Trump team is "fine-tuning" an executive order aimed at reducing domestic beef prices
Monday: Tyson Sinks, Walmart Falls After Trump Moves To Temporarily Lower Beef Import Tariffs
Following Monday afternoon's WSJ report that the White House will temporarily cut beef import tariffs, we spoke with three ranchers across America's beef-producing corridor, centered on the Great and Southern Plains, to gauge industry sentiment.
The message from all three, including Elkins Cattle Company, Beck Ranch, and KC Cattle Company, premier ranchers featured in the ZeroHedge Store, was broadly the same: the proposed policy may briefly ease pressure on ground beef prices at the supermarket, but it does little to address the deeper structural crisis facing the nation's cattle herd and could further weaken domestic producers.
With U.S. herds already near historic lows and ranchers still battered by elevated costs for diesel, labor, fertilizer, equipment, and transportation, a flood of cheap imported beef risks pushing cattle prices lower without reducing producers' operating expenses.
In other words, Trump's potential move to ease beef prices at the store appears aimed at boosting affordability ahead of the midterms. What needs to happen is for the administration to push pro-growth policies that rebuild America's cattle supply over the medium to long term.
By Tuesday morning, Reuters reports that the Trump team is "fine-tuning" an executive order aimed at reducing domestic beef prices.
"The president is committed to lowering beef and other grocery costs for everyday Americans, and the administration is accordingly fine-tuning potential executive actions to alleviate temporary shortages in the domestic beef market," the White House told the outlet in an emailed statement.
Here's the first take from Tim Elkins of Elkins Cattle Company (of Texas):
Here is how I see it:
Tariff-rate quota is basically a penalty threshold that gets removed. This in turn, allows imported beef to enter at lower tarrifs. US cattle herds are at record lows BUT we have slowly been rebuilding. By removing this barrier this is going to drive cattle prices down.
While that’s GOOD for consumers, it’s VERY bad for us cattle ranchers. Our input costs are still sky high. Think: Transport (diesel costs), tractor parts, labor, fertilizer etc. These costs DONT come down for us with this. It just makes us compete with lower cost, lower quality imported beef.
With supply rising due to this, it will lower consumer costs, but it doesn’t change our input costs. We already have been subsiding a lot of the costs because the consumer will simply not pay the prices, meaning lower profit margins to us.
To the point of barely surviving the way it is today with cattle prices are RECORD HIGHS. The main brunt of this will be felt amongst Cow-Calf operators (who grow herds) and stocker operations (feeders).
The BIG winners here, again, is the BIG 4 packers who have a monopoly on the industry. (Tyson, JBS, Cargill, National Beef).
Lowers costs for them while putting American Ranchers/Farmers in the backseat… If these imports suppress cattle prices, as I expect they will, US-based ranchers will likely not grow herds aggressively in a time where herds are already EXTREMELY low.
This doesn’t fix anything and in fact kicks the can down the road to a bigger problem. Also, most of this will be seen in “Trimmings” of the cow often used to make ground beef/hamburgers.
Due to the quality of the animals coming in from oversees being so much worse than US raised beef, it is HIGHLY unlikely that you will see your higher end steak prices come down at all.
Our “trimmings” prices, which typically is the only area cattle producers can make any return on, will be forced lower, which will CRUSH US beef producers.
However, your typical McDonald’s burger, at today’s prices, will just return the difference to big corporations and the BIG 4. By NO WAY, does this support US ranches/farms. Rather, puts most on the brink of total collapse.
I think personally that this is a serious threat on US producers and will strain many ranchers to the point of shutting their doors.
Over time, we have put the BIG 4 in the driver's seat while ignoring the folks that have done all the heavy lifting and doing the right thing day after day.
Second take is from Annalisa Beck of Bech Ranch (of Wyoming):
Tariff-rate quota suspension is intended to address short-term beef supply shortages and high consumer prices. This will only be a short-term fix.
The price of the calf at auction is currently at its highest. The entire cattle-raising part of the country is in a drought.
The price of hay, fertilizer, diesel fuel, and other inputs are at their highest. Those high-priced calves haven't even hit the store shelves yet; we are about a year away from that.
However, we have seen a dramatic increase in the direct-to-consumer prices, especially in the operations that don't raise all of their own cows from birth (some are selling their ground beef for $18/lb - this makes me want to choke).
The only way to fix the problem long term is to lower input prices (diesel, fertilizer, hay), lower the price the rancher is getting at auction (which will actually force more ranchers out of the system), or realize that $12 for a pound of ground beef that will feed a family of 4 at $3/serving is really not that expensive when everyone is ok with a $7 12 oz latte, or a $14 value meal that only feeds one person.
I think instead of screaming that the prices are too high, we need to educate the consumer that good, locally raised, nutrient-dense food is worth the investment.
The third take is from Patrick Montgomery of KC Cattle Company (of Missouri):
I understand why the Trump administration is doing this. Beef is too expensive at the grocery store. The cattle inventory is at historic lows. RFK is publicly pleading with American ranchers to stop selling their breeding stock and they won't, because the economics of ranching are broken. Your average cattleman wants to retire and there is no next generation replacing him. Trump needs consumer prices down by the midterms and suspending the TRQ is the fastest lever he can pull.
I get it. But this is a band-aid on an arterial bleed.
The real problem is structural and neither side of the aisle will touch it. Fix the money. Not through more subsidies. Not through grants. Bring back an actual free market for agriculture.
America is not capable of feeding its own populace anymore.
Here is why.
Crop land. America's farmland overwhelmingly produces corn and soybeans. Much of that goes to export or gets processed into products we should not be consuming. Why? Because it is heavily subsidized and farmers are incentivized to grow it. This has been the case for over 50 years, dating back to Earl Butz's "get big or get out" USDA policy in the early 1970s. Before Butz, American farms were diversified. After Butz, we became a monoculture economy. Ironically, Butz was Cargill's guy.
If our country ripped away those subsidies today it would be disastrous because we have lost the ability to grow anything else at scale. We don't have the implements for American farmers to produce vegetables and diversified crops at volume. We have degraded our soil health with decades of artificial fertilizers, herbicides, and fungicides. We do not have the logistics infrastructure to move a consumable product from an American farm to an American kitchen. And we have lost the institutional knowledge. Three generations of farmers have known nothing but corn and beans.
Protein is equally broken. Why would anyone start a ranching operation to break even or lose money and on a good year net 2%? Warren Buffett would not invest in that business and neither will the next generation of farmers.
Since the pandemic we have exported our beef production to countries like Brazil at an accelerating rate. According to Austin Frerick's book Barons, Brazil dedicates a landmass the size of Vermont and New Hampshire combined to producing beef for the American market. Brazilian companies own controlling equity in two of the Big Four packers. JBS is publicly traded and their annual 10K filings over the last few years are fascinating if you understand what has been happening to the domestic supply chain. Why would Brazilian-owned companies care if American ranches disappear? That is good for their business. Happy to go deeper on that if it is useful.
Our largest pork producer is Smithfield, owned by a CCP-held entity. Given the current state of the world that should concern everyone.
The part that scares me most. Syngenta controls the proprietary seed genetics that go into American farm ground. Syngenta is directly owned by the CCP. Subsidized dollars from American farmers flow directly into a Chinese state owned company that controls what we can plant and how we plant it.
So what is the fix? Fix the money.
We do not need more subsidies. We need food sovereignty. American farmers cannot compete against imports produced under less regulation at cheaper cost. Suspending the TRQ makes that problem worse in the short term even if it helps consumers at the register.
I do like the SBA access-to-capital piece. That is the single hardest barrier in farming. But without structural reform, those dollars end up subsidizing the mega corporations that sit between the farmer and the consumer, not the farmer.
One more layer to this that I think matters.
Peter Zeihan has been writing for years about the unraveling of the post World War 2 global trade order. The system established at Bretton Woods in 1944, where America guaranteed freedom of the seas and open markets in exchange for alliance solidarity, has governed global commerce for 80 years. That system is coming apart. We are watching it in real time. The fallout with the EU. Britain going its own direction. The fracturing of traditional trade partnerships including with China. Increasingly common conflicts involving Iran and Venezuela designed to apply pressure. Our own push toward energy independence.
The world is becoming less global and more national. Most people in Washington understand this when it comes to energy. When it comes to semiconductors. When it comes to defense manufacturing.
The question I hear no one in power asking is this. What happens if we poke the bear and they turn off our food? What is the contingency plan for a country that cannot feed itself without foreign controlled supply chains, foreign owned processing, and foreign owned seed genetics?
Maybe that plan exists and it is classified. But I do not see how it works when the same entities that control our protein processing also have deep economic ties to the countries we are applying pressure to. Follow the ownership structures. Follow the money. The vulnerability is not theoretical. It is sitting in plain sight.
That is why food sovereignty is not a consumer issue. It is a national security issue. And until the people making policy treat it that way, we are going to keep putting bandaids on a problem that requires surgery.
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Tyson Sinks, Walmart Falls After Trump Moves To Temporarily Lower Beef Import TariffsTyson Foods and Walmart shares moved lower around noon in New York, while major Brazilian meatpacker Minerva Foods moved higher on a Wall Street Journal report that says the White House will temporarily cut beef import tariffs
According to the WSJ report, the plan would suspend the annual tariff-rate quota, which imposes higher duties once import limits are reached, allowing more foreign beef to flood the U.S. at lower tariff rates to suppress soaring prices.
The move comes as the U.S. cattle herd has fallen to a 75-year low, driving the latest USDA national average supermarket beef prices to near $7 per pound, squeezing meat processors and pushing consumers into trade-downs to cheaper proteins such as chicken and pork.
Walmart shares are down about 2.5% around noon.
Tyson Foods shares dropped about 4.5%.
Meanwhile, Brazilian meatpacker Minerva is up nearly 2%.
Related beef coverage:
"No Quick Fixes": Supply-Chain Deep Dive Shows Beef Prices To Remain High
US Beef Cow Cycle Low Set To Deepen, Keeping Steak Prices High
DoJ Opens Criminal Probe Into Meatpacking Cartel As Food Stocks Slide
The move by the Trump administration to put a ceiling on ground beef and steak prices comes ahead of the midterm elections, as a race to make things more affordable in the wake of the energy price spike following the U.S.-Iran war becomes a central focus again.
We suspect U.S. ranchers won't be too happy about foreign meats set to flood the U.S. in even greater quantities.
Tyler Durden Tue, 05/12/2026 - 11:33Korean markets were under pressure overnight after politicians floated the idea of tapping AI profits.
Bloomberg reports that a top South Korean policymaker said the nation should pay citizens a 'dividend' using taxes on AI profits, with the obvious read through to Samsung and SK Hynix.
The comments in a Facebook post by presidential policy chief Kim Yong-beom fueled sharp swings in Korean stocks on Tuesday as investors struggled to parse the scope of the proposals.
“Excess profits in the AI era are, by nature, concentrated,” Kim wrote.
Memory companies, core engineers and asset holders in Seoul are highly likely to receive substantial benefits, while much of the middle class may experience only indirect effects, he said.
The size of any potential dividend, and other details on how Kim’s proposals might be implemented, weren’t immediately clear.
Still, investors took notice.
“After some 80% gain this year, the market was getting sensitive to any news that can trigger investor jitters,” said Kim Dojoon, chief investment officer at Zian Investment Management.
“Policy chief Kim’s post was easy to draw misunderstanding from the market at such a moment.”
The benchmark KOSPI initially plunged as much as 5.1% (more than $300 billion in market cap)...
The weakness spread into Europe and is dragging down Nasdaq futures in the pre-market...
But, as the impact of his statement spread across markets, damage control quickly hit with the influential policy adviser clarifying he wanted to tap "excess tax revenue" generated from the AI boom, rather than roll out a new windfall levy on corporate profits.
An official at the president’s office told Bloomberg News that Kim’s remarks represented his personal opinion and weren’t the subject of formal discussions.
However, the episode is the latest example of politicians calling attention to how the advent of AI risks widening the gap between the haves and have-nots.
In South Korea, that concern has surfaced in public calls for industry leaders to share more of the spoils of the global AI infrastructure rollout.
While Kim’s ideas are preliminary, if they were to be rolled out it would mark one of the first concerted government efforts to share the proceeds of the boom.
As Goldman's One-Delta desk-head, Rich Privorotsky, noted this morning, this feels like a theme that could resonate globally given the extreme concentration of AI earnings and the fact that the benefits skew so disproportionately to mega cap winners.
The speed of fast money/retail chasing semis, plus the proliferation of 2x/3x levered structures in Korea and the US, gives me pause about the fragility building into this rally but obviously the core of thesis, 'we need more tokens' remains unshaken.
Tyler Durden Tue, 05/12/2026 - 11:30
Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via Oilprice.com,
Global coal shipments and imports surged in March and April as buyers scrambled for fuel amid massively disrupted oil and gas supply from the Middle East.
The trend has been accelerating in recent weeks, and global coal imports are on track to reach their third-highest monthly level on record, according to estimates by analytics platform Kpler cited by the Financial Times.
In the wake of the worst oil and gas supply disruption in history, coal is back in demand, so much so that even countries and regions that believed coal use was in an irreversible terminal decline have boosted imports.
For example, last month coal shipments to South Korea, Japan, and the European Union surged by 27% from a year earlier, data from BIMCO, the world’s biggest shipowners’ association, said last week.
The Asian importers and the European bloc are scrambling for alternatives to gas supply from the Middle East, currently trapped behind the Strait of Hormuz or not produced at all in Qatar, which halted LNG production as early as on March 2 and two weeks later sustained damages to the world’s largest LNG complex, Ras Laffan, from Iranian missile strikes.
“The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has disrupted LNG shipments out of the Persian Gulf and has contributed to an 8% y/y drop in global seaborne LNG shipments in April,” BIMCO said.
South Korea has pushed back the retirement of coal-fired power generation capacity amid the oil and gas shock caused by the Middle East war.
Europe, for its part, is currently losing the competition with Asia for spot LNG supply, at a time when it needs to fill gas storage sites ahead of the next winter.
Energy security concerns are shifting policy responses, accelerating coal usage across key Asian and European markets, and delaying coal plant retirements, analysts at Wood Mackenzie say.
Tyler Durden Tue, 05/12/2026 - 11:05A total of 11 hantavirus cases have been confirmed as of Tuesday morning, with global health officials warning that the number could rise.
The risk to the public from an illness called the hantavirus is low, a U.S. official said on May 11.
“Let me be crystal clear: the risk of hantavirus to the general public remains very, very low,” Dr. Brian Christine, assistant secretary for health and head of the U.S. Public Health Service, told reporters during a briefing in Omaha, Nebraska.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had said in a May 8 health alert to doctors and health departments that doctors should be aware that imported hantavirus cases were possible but that “the risk of broad spread to the United States is considered extremely unlikely at this time.”
As Zachary Stieber reports for The Epoch Times, multiple people on board the M.V. Hondius, which departed from Argentina on April 1 and traveled to remote locations, including Antarctica, contracted a variant of the hantavirus called the Andes variant.
Three have died.
Christine said on Monday that “the Andes variant of this virus does not spread easily, and it requires prolonged close contact with someone who is already symptomatic.”
An American cruise ship passenger who tested positive on one test and negative on another was transported early Monday to the biocontainment unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, officials said. That individual is doing well and has no symptoms, Dr. Angela Hewlett, director of the unit, said at the briefing. That person will be tested again at some point.
Fifteen other Americans, including a British American, who were on the Hondius were admitted around the same time into a separate area called the quarantine unit. They have not displayed symptoms. They may be tested, based on conversations between physicians and those individuals, officials said.
Two additional Americans who were aboard the ship were transported to a biocontainment unit at Emory University in Atlanta. One of those Americans has shown symptoms of hantavirus; the other is that person’s partner.
The people being cared for at the facilities in Nebraska and Georgia can leave after they have been symptom-free for at least a few days, according to Dr. Brendan Jackson, acting director of the CDC’s Division of High-Consequence Pathogens and Pathology.
Other Americans who previously left the Hondius are in contact with state officials and have been told that if they develop symptoms, they should alert their doctors and those officials, Jackson said.
Symptoms of the hantavirus include fever, fatigue, and shortness of breath.
The virus typically spreads from contact with infected rodents, but officials say it may have been transmitted from person-to-person on the cruise ship.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, acting CDC director, said over the weekend that hantavirus is “not COVID” because it does not transmit as easily.
“I can assure you that the CDC has been absolutely on top of this outbreak,” he said.
“There’s not a great wealth of information,” said WHO epidemiologist Olivier le Polain during a public briefing Monday.
“We don’t know how much it might spread just before people develop symptoms.”
Decades of experience in South America have shown the virus to be associated with “rare human-to-human transmission after close and prolonged contact with a sick, infected person,” Erica Pan, California’s public health officer, told reporters Monday.
But the available evidence is limited.
No indications of a larger outbreak of the deadly hantavirus have appeared so far, a World Health Organization official said on May 12.
“At the moment, there is no sign that we are seeing the start of a larger outbreak,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the organization’s director-general, told reporters in Madrid, Spain, during a press conference with Spain’s prime minister.
“But, of course, the situation could change, and given the long incubation period of the virus, it’s possible we might see more cases in the coming weeks.”
The incubation period for the Andes variant of the virus is up to 42 days.
Tyler Durden Tue, 05/12/2026 - 10:45