Pressure may be easing for steelmakers and with it the prospects, in some regions at least, of slightly improved margins. Coking coal, a key raw steelmaking ingredient and recently one of the commodity markets’ hot darlings, has been falling in price since the summer. As Australia’s spot price has fallen some 26 percent since the [...]
Ostensibly, the good news in making moves to end zeroing practices for good (as we outlined in Part One of this post) is that our trading partners won’t be docking US exports with retaliatory fees, which makes the likes of the United Steel Workers (not to mention domestic steel producers exporting their products) happy: “One [...]
Remember zeroing? The controversial US practice in figuring antidumping violations that’s been frowned upon by the World Trade Organization (WTO), and has made trade enemies of certain US industries in the eyes of Japan, the European Union, and a host of other nations? Well, that practice has likely met its demise, finally, based on the [...]
Continued from Part One. As the FT report says, just this year the Australian dollar is up nearly 6 percent against the US dollar since the start of January, and BHP Billiton, not usually thought of as a high-cost producer, announced last week that it would temporarily cut production at its Mount Keith nickel mine [...]
Taking a first pass over the World Bureau of Metal Statistics’ monthly bulletin report on 2011 production, consumption and inventory up to the end of November, one could be excused for thinking the tin market was operating in a comfortable surplus and the sell-off seen in 2011 is a reflection of a market in oversupply. [...]
The floodwaters may be slowly — agonizingly slowly — receding, but like ripples on a pond, the ramifications of Thailand’s recent floods are spreading around the globe and forward in time. According to Businessweek, at least 533 people have been killed since late July, when monsoon rains began lashing Thailand. Flooding worsened in October, when [...]
It would seem not everyone is frozen by indecision in the headlights of the European debt crisis. In many emerging markets, both governments and corporations are forging ahead with ambitious investments with plenty of money in the pocket or access to ready sources of finance. At the Dubai Air Show, Emirates Airlines, fast earning itself [...]
Debate has raged for decades about the benefits of integrated production facilities in the automotive industry. Arguably, Henry Ford started it at Rouge River in the 1920s when he built a complex capable of taking in raw materials such as iron ore at one end of a 2000-acre site and producing a finished car at [...]
