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 of the uncertain prospects for the global and US economies. Unfortunately, one journalist in the room wrote an article giving readers the impression that I forecast low growth for 3-4 years. I did not. What I said was that if you want to use history to develop a worst case planning scenario, look at the period 1990-1994 when global steel demand declined for 4 out of 5 years. However, for the reasons cited by James Moss in a posting on this blog I don’t believe there is a very high probability of such a dire outcome.
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