Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts
Written by John Packard
November 25, 2019
Steel Market Update will not publish on Thursday, Nov. 28, or Sunday, Dec. 1, due to the Thanksgiving Holiday. Our offices will be closed on Friday, Nov. 29, and will reopen on Monday, Dec. 2.
Our early December flat rolled and plate steel market trends survey will begin on Monday, Dec. 2. We will also go out to our service center data providers for their inventory and shipment information on Monday.
I will be traveling to New Orleans on Dec. 7-10 to attend the annual HARDI conference. As many of you are aware, I have been participating in the HARDI steel conference call for a couple of decades, and I speak at their conference. I am looking forward to seeing my wholesaler friends in NOLA.
My next trip after New Orleans will be to Ontario, Calif., where SMU will be conducting one of our Steel 101: Introduction to Steel Making & Market Fundamentals Workshops. The workshop still has plenty of seats available. We will be touring the California Steel Industries (CSI) steel mill as part of our workshop. Our instructors include two metallurgists (Walburn & McDaniels), one sales and consulting expert (Simon), one purchasing and consulting expert (Briccetti) and me with my 42 years of sales, purchasing, management, marketing, reporting and analytical experience. This workshop comes highly recommend by past attendees. You can find more information on our website: www.SteelMarketUpdate.com/Events/Steel101
We want to wish those in the United States a happy and healthy Thanksgiving Holiday with family and friends.
As always, your business is truly appreciated by all of us here at Steel Market Update.
John Packard, President & CEO
John Packard
Read more from John PackardLatest in Final Thoughts
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.