Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts
Written by John Packard
March 16, 2018
SMU will begin our next flat rolled and plate steel market trends analysis beginning at 8 AM ET tomorrow morning (Monday). Please check your inbox (or SPAM filter) for our invitation to participate in the mid-March process. If you would like to be included in this or future surveys, please send an email to info@SteelMarketUpdate.com.
I will be in the office all this week. Next week, I will be traveling to Chicago as we are hosting one of our sold-out Steel 101 workshops in conjunction with NLMK Portage minimill.
Our next Steel 101 workshop will be on June 5 & 6, 2018, in Memphis, Tenn., and we will be touring two Nucor steel mills: Hickman and Nucor-Yamato. I anticipate we’ll have the registration and details set up on our website early this week. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please send them to info@SteelMarketUpdate.com. If you would like to register, contact Brett Linton at 706-216-2140.
We will have more details about how trading companies and end users are working toward getting exclusions to the Section 232 tariffs, which are scheduled to go into effect on March 23. If you would like to ask questions or need a clarification, please send me an email: John@SteelMarketUpdate.com and I will do my best to get you a prompt response. Lewis Leibowitz has advised me he will be working through the procedures once they are published in the Federal Register (which should happen on Monday).
On top of all of this, there are AD/CVD duties that have been challenged on CORE, and the results are expected in April. We will be working on this, as well.
Plus, union contracts are up in September…
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.