Final Thoughts

It has been an incredibly busy day. The Trump administration was busy taking care of our “friends…” Canada, Mexico and the European Union are no longer excluded from the 232 tariffs. I got a note from a mill friend of mine who laid out the scenario as he saw it:

“The irony of this whole thing is that Trump has now given an advantage to the countries that are traditional dumpers, like Russia, and a disadvantage to good trading partners like Canada by putting the same penalties on them. If you compare coated, Russia has a low cost of production and certainly would have lost a trade case because they often resort to very aggressive prices when selling. Now they can sell unlimited volume with a 25 percent duty on a low cost. Brazil has lost all trade cases in flat, and surely would have lost a coated case, too. But they can sell duty free under a quota. Canada never sold cheap steel, has an integrated supply chain within NAFTA, would not have had a dumping case, yet it is at a huge disadvantage over those other two!”