Posts tagged as:

World

How low can we go? GDP and steel demand

October 17, 2008

Yesterday, I made a presentation at the American Metal Market conference on wire & wire rod. The title was “How low can we go?” and my purpose was to provide a few heuristics for relating GDP projections to steel demand, both globally and in the US. I tried to avoid making a specific forecast because […]

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6 reasons why a downturn in steel won’t be as bad as in the past

October 15, 2008

The tumult in financial markets will spill over into the ‘real’ economy in a number of ways not least of course in slowing economic growth on regional and global levels. Slower economic growth means less steel consumption and production so it’s worthwhile, if a little sobering, to contemplate just how hard steel might be hit. There have […]

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Where to go to dig up the facts about iron ore

September 25, 2008

There has been a lot of news lately about how the largest iron ore producers want to change the traditional yearly contract negotiations with their biggest customers.  If you are trying to follow what’s going on and you need some background on the iron ore market and history, you can get some answers online through […]

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IMF World GDP Growth Forecast

July 17, 2008

The IMF just released its latest World Economic Outlook. The WEO includes world gdp growth forecasts for 2008 and 2009. Not surprisingly, world growth is expected to decelerate to 4.1% in 2008 and 3.9% in 2009, compared to 5.1% in 2006 and 5.0% in 2007. What does this mean for global steel demand growth? The […]

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World’s largest steel producers in 2007

July 16, 2008

Here’s an update of the IISI’s list of the world’s largest steelmakers in 2007 in a form you can do something with. The data on the 2006 tab is from Metal Bulletin and has their list for 2005.  

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High steel prices tell us what to do

June 9, 2008

Martin Wolf, as he often does, wrote an interesting column in the Financial Times recently called The market sets high oil prices to tell us what to do. As $1,000/ton steel becomes an accepted fact of life it’s worth asking what the market is telling us to do about high steel prices. Martin Wolf offers […]

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