Posts tagged as:

gdp

2010 GDP growth and steel demand forecast

February 12, 2010

The IMF recently released an updated forecast of global GDP growth for 2010.  As many of you know, I’m fond of using the historical relationship between GDP and steel demand to forecast steel demand growth.  In fact, last year about this time I provided a forecast of 2009 global steel demand using the latest available [...]

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World crude steel output 2009 full year – down 8%

January 22, 2010

Worldsteel just published the data for crude steel production for December 2009 and in doing so the total for the year. You can see their press release here and the data for 2009 and back to 2006 by month and country in the Nerds spreadsheet below.
December crude steel production was just about flat with November [...]

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2009 GDP forecasts and steel demand growth

February 2, 2009

The International Monetary Fund recently updated its global GDP growth forecast for 2009 and 2010.  Not surprisingly, the growth projections were revised downward.   So I thought I’d take the opportunity to update the graph showing the relationship between global GDP and steel demand and to refine the comments I made in a recent post using [...]

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2009 will be tough for steel – but how tough?

January 6, 2009

2009 will be a difficult year for the global steel industry.  How bad it gets and what happens on the other side of the global slowdown is impossible to predict. But there is no shortage of observers willing to paint a bleak picture.  In a recent article in the Financial Times, Peter Marsh summed up the [...]

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GDP and steel demand in Europe

November 23, 2008

In response to a presentation I posted recently on this blog, I received the following questions from an investment firm based in Switzerland.

1) Is your indicated correlation also applicable to Europe only, i.e. could it be used to forecast steel demand in Europe?
2) Europe is expected to grow below 2,5% real GDP for the next [...]

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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? [...]

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SMA May 2008 presentation

May 22, 2008

Below is a presentation I made to the Steel Manufacturers Association’s annual members meeting in Washington, DC on May 20, 2008. The title was “Black Swans in the Steel Industry: What do They Mean?” (Of course the title is taken from the best selling book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.) My presentation identifies what [...]

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Is R for recession or resilience?

January 9, 2008

Goldman Sachs reported today that it believes the US economy will suffer a recession in 2008, and Goldman is not alone.  It seems everyone is worried about the impact of the credit crunch and high energy costs on US consumers.  So, what might a recession mean for shipments by steel producers in the US in 2008? 
There is clearly a [...]

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