An article that appeared in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal caught my attention because it show cased how people fleeing Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, due to the violence, have taken up new residence, opened new nightclubs and restaurants among other new businesses in El Paso Texas. We had discussed the fact that metal fabrication shops had [...]
Last week we reported on a story involving a legal case brought against a titanium distributor accused of falsely certifying test certificates for having supplied an alternative product that did not comply with a military specification. Ironically, the story broke last year. The only newsworthy aspect involved a trial delay recently reported by American Metal [...]
You have got to hand it to the Chinese they are nothing if not smart. In an article on China’s growing wind power market, the Washington Post illustrates the danger the US faces if it adopts a European style cap and trade carbon scheme. China is moving faster in its environmental efforts than almost any [...]
How much longer can China continue creating growth by throwing money at fixed investments? From a reserves point of view the answer is several years but from the point of view of creating serious imbalances the country is already on dangerous ground. An FT article explains that investment made up 7.3% of a 7.7% annual [...]
I always enjoy the networking that attending conferences allows one to do. The conference MetalMiner hosted, “Managing Supply Chain Risks for Critical and Strategic Metals attempted to bring together two key parts of a supply chain the mining companies and the manufacturing end-users. And though I had hoped that these two key audiences would mingle [...]
Comments made by Dan DiMicco CEO and Chairman of mini mill steel maker Nucor last week to Wall Street analysts and reported in a Reuters article, underline the state of steel making in North America. “We do not believe that real demand has really improved much since the end of last year. And we don’t [...]
Dr Irving Mintzer principal of MEG LLC, an energy consulting firm, described a “nightmare scenario” at the Critical & Strategic Metals Summit in Washington DC this week. Driven not by cost advantage but by a combination of government incentives, legislation and taxation, Dr Mintzer painted a picture of a world in 2030 in which a [...]
Yesterday, Dudley Kingsnorth of IMCOA (Industrial Minerals Company of Australia Pty Ltd), an expert in the field of Rare Earth metals, explained to a group of manufacturers, mining companies, representatives of the DLA among other government officials, that the total sum of money available for investment for rare earth metal exploration and mining equates to [...]
