Final Thoughts

Final Thoughts

Written by John Packard


Due to our conference, we will hold back on producing our steel indices until Thursday of this week.

It’s Tuesday evening and we are deep into our 8th SMU Steel Summit Conference. The official number of attendees is 912, which exceeded our most optimistic expectations when we did our last forecast about six months back.

Tomorrow (Wednesday) we have a very strong program with Alan Beaulieu of ITR Economics, a one-on-one discussion between Nucor CEO John Ferriola and me, an interesting manufacturing panel, followed by Ron Insana of CNBC and then another one-on-one with Robert Perlman, Executive Chairman of CRU, along with a panel consisting of Chris Houlden and Josh Spoores of CRU and myself.

Then I get to collapse and sleep for four days (thank you for the Labor Day weekend).

We will not publish on Sunday due to the holiday.

I want to thank my SMU team for all of the hard work they have put into our conference as well as our newsletters: Ray Culley, Jill Waldman, Brett Linton, Diana Packard, Alison Lalonde, Tim Triplett, Peter Wright and Sandy Williams. I also want to thank Steve Painter, Chuck McDaniels and Jeff Lalonde for their help during the conference.

We will have much more about the conference in Thursday evening’s issue of Steel Market Update.

As always, your business is truly appreciated by all of us here at Steel Market Update.

John Packard, President & CEO

Latest in Final Thoughts

Final Thoughts

Even before the news about Mexico, I didn’t want to overstate the magnitude of the change in momentum. As far as we could tell, there hadn’t been a frenzy of new ordering following President Trump’s announcement of 50% Section 232 tariffs. But higher tariffs had unquestionably raised prices for imports, which typically provide the floor for domestic pricing. We’d heard, for example, that prices below $800 per short ton for hot-rolled (HR) coil were gone from the domestic market – even for larger buyers.