Final Thoughts

Final Thoughts
Written by John Packard
March 16, 2018
SMU will begin our next flat rolled and plate steel market trends analysis beginning at 8 AM ET tomorrow morning (Monday). Please check your inbox (or SPAM filter) for our invitation to participate in the mid-March process. If you would like to be included in this or future surveys, please send an email to info@SteelMarketUpdate.com.
I will be in the office all this week. Next week, I will be traveling to Chicago as we are hosting one of our sold-out Steel 101 workshops in conjunction with NLMK Portage minimill.
Our next Steel 101 workshop will be on June 5 & 6, 2018, in Memphis, Tenn., and we will be touring two Nucor steel mills: Hickman and Nucor-Yamato. I anticipate we’ll have the registration and details set up on our website early this week. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please send them to info@SteelMarketUpdate.com. If you would like to register, contact Brett Linton at 706-216-2140.
We will have more details about how trading companies and end users are working toward getting exclusions to the Section 232 tariffs, which are scheduled to go into effect on March 23. If you would like to ask questions or need a clarification, please send me an email: John@SteelMarketUpdate.com and I will do my best to get you a prompt response. Lewis Leibowitz has advised me he will be working through the procedures once they are published in the Federal Register (which should happen on Monday).
On top of all of this, there are AD/CVD duties that have been challenged on CORE, and the results are expected in April. We will be working on this, as well.
Plus, union contracts are up in September…
As always, your business is truly appreciated by all of us here at Steel Market Update.
John Packard, Publisher

John Packard
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As Wolfe Research’s Timna Tanner put it in her opening talk at Tampa on Monday afternoon, we’re living in a world of “Trumplications” now. That probably means – at least in the short term – higher scrap costs, lower imports from countries hit with or threated tariffs, and higher steel prices. SMU data reflects that. Scrap went up in January. More than 75% of the respondents to our more recent survey expect scrap to go up again February, maybe by a lot. Lead times, meanwhile, have been ticking upward this month. It started with hot-rolled coil and plate earlier this month. Now we’re seeing coated lead times extending too.

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We joked in our last Final Thoughts that Wiley trade attorney Tim Brightbill – one of the nation’s leading experts on trade law and policy – would probably be revising his presentation on Trump, trade policy, and tariffs for the Tampa Steel Conference. He did. And even after those last-minute revisions, he actually got trumped […]

Final Thoughts
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Final Thoughts
From one group of folks, I’ve heard that Trump might not wait until Feb. 1 – the date he threatened on to place tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico. They say he could act as soon as Friday. And then there are those who don’t think anything will happen before April 1. That’s the deadline for Commerce, Treasury, and USTR to submit key reports on “America First Trade Policy” to President Trump.

Final Thoughts
Trump made a clarification in a speech on Monday. Previously, he had declared the word “tariff” the most beautiful word in the dictionary. No longer.