Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts
Written by John Packard
December 16, 2016
If there are going to be price increase announcements prior to the New Year they will most likely be made this week as opposed to next when most of the steel community is taking time off for the Holidays. If they are not made this week then the expectation has to be the first week of the New Year, with the expectation that scrap prices will be moving higher once the January negotiations kick into gear.
A reminder about our Holiday publishing schedule. We will publish on Tuesday and Thursday of this week. We will not publish on Sunday (Christmas Day) and will have very abbreviated issues on Tuesday, December 27th as well as Thursday, December 29th. We will not publish on Sunday, January 1st. We will return to our normal publication schedule with Tuesday, January 3rd issue.
We will publish a Premium issue either on Monday afternoon (19th) or Tuesday morning (20th).
We will begin our mid-December flat rolled steel market trends survey at 8 AM on Monday morning. If you receive an invitation, please take a few minutes to click on the link in the invitation which will take you to SurveyMonkey.com which hosts our surveys.
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John Packard, Publisher
John Packard
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Final Thoughts
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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.)