Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts
Written by John Packard
October 19, 2015
A reminder, if you received an email invitation to participate in our flat rolled market analysis please click on the link contained in the message. The questionnaire won’t take more than a few minutes to complete and at the end of the week we will have a Power Point presentation for all of those who participated in this week’s questionnaire.
License data continues to disappoint as trending toward numbers greater than 3.0 million tons for October. The good news from my office today is I at least spoke with a couple of companies who normally buy foreign steel and they are reporting they have little to no foreign steel on order at this time.
We continue to work diligently on our program for the upcoming Leadership Conference which will be held in March (8-9) at PGA National Resort & Spa the week after the hotel hosts the Honda Golf Classic. We are working with trade attorney Lewis Leibowitz to do a segment on the antidumping and countervailing duty trade laws, what changes may come out of the new trade language passed by the U.S. Congress earlier this summer as well as the status of each of the trade cases and what manufacturing companies and service centers need to be doing to protect their businesses in the future. We will have more details about the Trade segment of our program as well as other segments over the coming weeks. Right now you can set aside those dates…
Registration is open for our next Steel 101 workshop which will be held in Starkville, Mississippi on January 19-20, 2016 and will include a tour of the SDI Columbus steel mill. We are working with a brand new Marriott hotel (not even open yet) and we hope we can get all of the hotel arrangements confirmed by a live human being soon (we will add them to the website at that point in time).
As always your business is truly appreciated by all of us here at Steel Market Update.
John Packard, Publisher
John Packard
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Final Thoughts
It’s once again A Tale of Two Cities in the steel market. Some are almost euphoric about Trump’s victory. Others, some rather bearish, are more focused on the day-to-day market between now and Inauguration Day on Jan. 20.
Final Thoughts
One of the perhaps unintentional perks of being a trade journalist is the opportunity to travel and cover an array of industry conferences and events. Some I've attended have been at fun locations, like Palm Springs and Tampa, Fla. Others have been in more practical locations, like SMU’s Steel Summit in Atlanta and American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) and Steel Manufacturers Association (SMA) meetings in Washington, D.C.
Final Thoughts
t this point in the game I think what we can say about Nippon Steel’s proposed buy of Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel is that it will go through, it won’t go through, or the outcome will be something new and completely unexpected. Then again, I’m probably still missing a few options.
Final Thoughts
President-elect Donald Trump continues to send shockwaves through the political establishment (again). And steel markets and ferrous scrap markets continue to be, well, anything but shocking. As the French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote in 1849, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." (I thought the quote might have been Yankees catcher Yogi Berra in 1949. Google taught me something new today.)
Final Thoughts
President-elect Donald Trump will officially retake the White House on Jan. 20. I’ve been getting questions about how his administration’s policies might reshape the steel industry and domestic manufacturing. I covered the tumult and norm busting of Trump's first term: Section 232, Section 301, USMCA - and that's just on the trade policy side of things. It's safe to say that we'll have no shortage of news in 2025 when it comes to trade and tariffs.