Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts
Written by John Packard
March 25, 2016
SMU still has a number of open spots available for our next Steel 101: Introduction to Steel Making & Market Fundamentals workshop. The workshop will be held just outside of Toledo, Ohio as part of our program will be a tour of one of the most successful flat rolled mini-mills in the United States, the North Star Bluescope mill. Our highly experienced instructors, who come from steel mills (long and flat rolled), service center and manufacturing, are looking forward to working with another exceptional group of attendees. If you would like to learn more about our Steel 101 workshop please go to our website or feel free to contact me at: John@SteelMarketUpdate.com or by phone at: 800-432-3475 with any questions you might have.
I want to welcome our newest member companies (subscribers) to Steel Market Update. I encourage you to spend time going through our website as well as reading our newsletters. If you need help navigating the site or have questions please contact: Brett@SteelMarketUpdate.com and he should be able to assist you. If you have questions, comments or suggestions we are all ears. You can send them to me personally (my email is in the paragraph above) or to our general inbox: info@SteelMarketUpdate.com. Thank you for putting your faith in us and we will do our best to provide the best informed market intelligence possible.
I will be in Naples, Florida on Thursday through Saturday of this week attending the Association of Steel Distributors (ASD) annual meeting.
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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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.
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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.
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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.)