Posts tagged as:

demand

How low can we go? GDP and steel demand

October 17, 2008

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 […]

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6 reasons why a downturn in steel won’t be as bad as in the past

October 15, 2008

The tumult in financial markets will spill over into the ‘real’ economy in a number of ways not least of course in slowing economic growth on regional and global levels. Slower economic growth means less steel consumption and production so it’s worthwhile, if a little sobering, to contemplate just how hard steel might be hit. There have […]

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High steel prices tell us what to do

June 9, 2008

Martin Wolf, as he often does, wrote an interesting column in the Financial Times recently called The market sets high oil prices to tell us what to do. As $1,000/ton steel becomes an accepted fact of life it’s worth asking what the market is telling us to do about high steel prices. Martin Wolf offers […]

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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 […]

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IISI forecasts steel demand growth of 6.8% for 2008

October 9, 2007

The IISI published its short range outlook October 8. Here’s the link. It’s not available in any better form than a PDF, but that’s attached, IISI Short Range Outlook 10/8. The summary table is shown below: Table 1: Short range outlook for apparent steel use (2006-2008) in ‘000 of tonnes Regions 2006 2007 2008 % […]

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