Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Madman198237]

Are human beings really just that arrogant?

Yes.<sup>[1]

[1]</sup> The last 50000 years of recorded history.

FTFY

This has been Madman's Daily Dose of UnRealistic Pessimism.

[scriver]

I mean. Not a lot from then was recorded.

[da_nang]

So honest question: How dead is the American steel industry and if dead, what can be done to fix it?

It's a strategic industry. No sane country would just let those die off.

[smjjames]

No clue da_nang.

Ready for more Trump idiocity? Trump says trade wars are good and easy to win. Also ended up making the DOW nosedive a bit.

[MrRoboto75]

(also RIP Gen X, got passed over entirely)

Only thing gen X got was an X-Men spin off.

[Telgin]

No clue da_nang.

Ready for more Trump idiocity? Trump says trade wars are good and easy to win. Also ended up making the DOW nosedive a bit.

He can even take credit for the stock market moving this time and I'll believe him!

The stock market didn't exactly crash (it dropped by ~1%, not 30+%), but the last few times Trump has opened his mouth, I've lost money.  I picked a bad time to experiment with it.

[smjjames]

He's probably gonna somehow end up crashing it at this rate Though in theory it should be robust enough to not crash just because the President made a comment Wall Street freaks out over.

[Doomblade187]

@McTraveller, I feel that the knowledge of how work is done to effect change is something that builds as we go into the world. I have become less idealistic as I've gone through school, and work has done the same for me. Basically, I feel that yes, us younger generations don't understand yet how to effect change. But we're learning as we go.

[Sheb]

No clue da_nang.

Ready for more Trump idiocity? Trump says trade wars are good and easy to win. Also ended up making the DOW nosedive a bit.

And I thought mercantilism was dead...

@ da_nang: The Economist got a couple good wrap-up of the situation. Basically, steel-wise the USA currently import around a third of its steel while about a third of the US domestic capacity lay idle.

So not dead yet, not by a long shot, but like the rest of the steel industry worldwide, it's suffering from a current global glut of steel production due to China greatly expanding its steel capacity to fuel its economic growth, and then directing its steel to exports when its domestic demand slacked. To give you an idea of the magnitude of the change, China's share of world steel production went from 15% in 2000 to 50% in 2016. This huge glut caused the capacity usage worldwide (excluding China) to collapse from  86 to 69% between 2004 and 2016. (The article doesn't provide exact numbers for the US, but there is a graph and it looks like an even steeper fall for the US from 95% to slightly above 70% whith a particular steep fall in 2008 that must have hurt steel producer a lot.)



Now, it that aspect, you would think that tariffs to protect US steel mill from Chinese glut might make sense. But the issue is that they were already a bunch of tariffs targeted specifically at China, meaning only 3% of US steel came directly from there. Instead, the new tariffs will be hurting mostly US allies like Canada, Mexico and South Korea (although there is also a bunch of steel coming from Russia which is the fifth biggest supplier). The effect on the US economy will also be hurtful, as steel-using companies face raising input cost (and they account for more jobs and economic activity than steel mills) and US trade partners retaliate for the tariffs. Meanwhile, China won't be hurt much by the tariffs since it doesn't export much to the US anyway.

[scriver]

So basically you're saying what the US needs is some kind of economic agreement between countries, let's call it a trade deal, that makes other countries put tariffs on Chinese steel...

HMMMM

[Sheb]

So basically you're saying what the US needs is some kind of economic agreement between countries, let's call it a trade deal, that makes other countries put tariffs on Chinese steel...

HMMMM

Well, there is no easy solutions. Multilateral pressure on China might work, but it's hard to coordinate and to make legal re:WTO (Which is BTW the reason the US government is using the paper-thing "national security" excuse). And really it's not sure it's going to work, pressuring China isn't easy. Going through the WTO will take at least a couple years. This mean that by the time a solution is reached, US producers might have closed, and smelter that closed probably wouldn't open again. Something similar happened to a lot of lumber industry in Belgium: raising lumber price due to strong Chinese demand caused a lot of companies to close, and when price went down a couple years later, they didn't reopen.

Still, it would probably have been by far the best solution, but let's face it, with its America First instinct and gutted state department, careful multilateral diplomacy really isn't this administration strong suit, or inclination.

It's really a pretty large problem in the US-China rivalry. One of the US's main asset is its world-spanning network of allies, but this administration sees them as burden rather than partners, and is conceding the field to China in many places.

[sluissa]

Not an economist(in fact I dropped out of the only economy class I ever took on the first day.) but doesn't it seem like most developed economies would prefer to be importing the raw materials for things and exporting produced goods? I mean, if you have it, use it, of course. But the way the market is there doesn't seem to be any real economic benefit to digging it out of the ground yourself when it costs as much or less to just buy it off a ship.

I get there is a balance, on a nation scale of imports and exports that needs to be considered. But with raw materials like steel, it's almost always going to be turned into something that's worth more than the stacks of billet steel that come in. It's not like importing a whole finished car where the only value multiplier is the final markup at the dealership. (Unless you count the car as capital to the owner in that it might help them as a direct business asset or assist them in getting a job that requires a commute.)

I'm not saying we shouldn't be making our own steel. But the US has this weird fetish with people who dig things out of the ground and how their jobs mean more than other jobs for some reason. It's an important job, for sure. But one that has a dwindling amount of maximum workers when you compare:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

and

[nenjin]

The Mechanicus dubs this device the "Atlean Rapeanatrox."

[MrRoboto75]

But the US has this weird fetish with people who dig things out of the ground and how their jobs mean more than other jobs for some reason.

Its because historically miners were literal economic slaves that died young due to black lung.  That view is antiquated now, but still.

[Dorsidwarf]

for stuff like steel a millitary powerhouse like the US does not want, for obvious reasons, to be overly reliant on the goodwill of other powerful nations that may not be friends forever, like china or russia