While the rise in iron-ore prices will hurt steelmakers without their own iron resources, steelmakers with their own iron-ore are possibly about to hit payday ” along with company investors. OneSteel of Australia, for example, was recently featured in an Andrew Harrison article in the Wall Street Journal as one of the few steelmaking companies [...]
In a determined effort to cut costs, Rolls-Royce PLC recently announced plans to dismiss 2,300 workers, nearly six percent of the company’s approximately 39,500 international employees. Workers in the U.K., the U.S., Germany, and Nordic countries will most feel the sting, according to the Wall Street Journal. The U.K. jet-engine maker seems to be faring well, with [...]
And what does the price of Ferro Nickel in India have to do with that spatula you used last night? Actually, quite a bit. India is about to cut the import duty for Ferro Nickel by 3% for 2008. According to this Economic Times article both nickel and chromium prices are also expected to fall [...]
For any consumer of Cobalt metal or components with any significant Cobalt content the price pressures must have been nigh on unbearable this past year. Driven by consumer demand and an element of speculative buying in the face of tight supplies, Cobalt has increased from $13/lb at the beginning of 2006 to $27/lb at the [...]
A couple of years ago, Stuart told me about a few metals related thefts in his area including his own 20 ton aluminum container worth about $60,000 (at the time). Stuart maintains an ownership stake in a specialist stocking company in the UK. Then, just two weeks later, a truckload of copper worth $100,000 was [...]
At the same time that respected Wall Street guru David Rosenberg, Chief Economist at Merrill Lynch declared that in his opinion the US is actually in the first month of recession, we came across a wonderfully upbeat report on the prospects for the world economy in Britain’s Daily Telegraph that we wanted to share with [...]
I’m not going to get into too many political discussions on this blog. I’ll leave that to my husband Jason Busch with his blog. But on a recent trip to NASA with our four-year-old, I couldn’t help but smile when our tour bus driver began discussing his pet subject, commercializing NASA innovations. Needless to say, [...]
I read a fascinating article the other day by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard for the Sunday Telegraph The Sunday Telegraph (the slightly stuffy Sunday edition of Britain’s best quality paper the Daily Telegraph). My father worked for them for 20 years and banned the reading in our house of any other newspaper – a rule that still holds [...]
