Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts
Written by John Packard
January 18, 2019
It’s football night in North America, so I don’t know how many late Sunday night readers I will have. Hopefully, your team won, and all is well with the world.
We have closed registrations for the end of January Steel 101 workshop. Our next workshop will be in Baytown, Texas, (just outside of Houston) and we will tour the JSW Baytown plate and pipe mills. I will have more details on the final date and exact location later this week.
Over the weekend, a local NPR station produced an article about President Trump’s steel “wall” and I was used as one of their sources in the final story. You can read the full story here: http://www.witf.org/news/2019/01/how-a-steel-border-wall-and-the-shutdown-it-caused-impacts-the-steel-industry.php
We will begin rolling out some of our SMU Steel Summit Conference speakers and providing early glimpses into pieces of our program starting this week. Registration is open as is hotel registration for the Gateway area hotels. You can find information about the conference on our website: www.SteelMarketUpdate.com/Events/Steel-Summit and you can use the following link to go directly to the registration form.
We will begin our mid-January flat rolled and steel plate market trends analysis at 8 AM ET on Monday morning. If you receive an invitation, please take a few minutes to answer the first question, which is at the end of the invitation email, and you will then be taken to the balance of the questionnaire. If you would like to participate in our questionnaire, send an email to John@SteelMarketUpdate.com
As always, your business is truly appreciated by all of us here at Steel Market Update.
John Packard, President & CEO
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.