US Steel is idling plants, despite tariffs designed to save them
cnn.com
cnn.com
If that is still the case, then demand for US steel is determined by infrastructure investment, not trade.
If you need nice steel, or nice case iron, the Chinese material is bad. You can't really grind any chinese cast iron that I have seen precisely, and none of the steel that I've seen from there has been clean or dimensionally accurate. For most uses, that doesn't matter, and it is totally fine. The European and American tool steel is FAR FAR better than anything that I've seen from china. I tend not to use chinese HSS for steel, since it breaks so easily.
Source: taking a break from machining steel on a bridgeport
But it is interesting to hear that quality does differ region to region based on the local needs. Again, that makes the case that imported steel vs domestic steel isn't a clear cut issue if proximity matters.
Precisely.
In the knife world, many (dare I say most) of the best tool steels used for knife making are made by Crucible Industries, a US company.
For example, the dominant steel used to make knives for bladesports[1][2] is CPM M4.
___
But hey if you can get those votes in swing districts thats all that matters in the end. A few thousand steelworker votes are more important than all votes in California for POTUS2020 so expect more of the same.
I hope you appreciate that this is a very disingenuous argument. the Californian voters would get a lot more attention if they didn't all vote the same way every time.
>The US steel near me is generally higher quality than the chinese steel around here
While this may seem contradictory, it's perfectly natural on an open market.
There's always some demand for cheap, low quality steel and also some demand for the expensive, high quality steel. Knocking together a bookshelf has much different requirements than building a car; the economy needs both.
For the low quality, cheap steel, transportation costs would constitute a higher fraction of cost than for high quality, expensive one. Thus it makes sense to buy the low quality locally, while importing the high quality from far away - where the low q would not be cheap enough due to the transportation. Nonetheless the US has enough of know-how and infrastructure to produce high quality materials whenever there's enough demand.
I firmly believe the current round of tariffs are primarily a geopolitical tool - aimed mostly at imports from China, to help with geopolitical negotiations and also encourage diversification of import sources. Likewise with the recent kerfuffle with Mexico - where the proposed tariffs were used to entice them to handle the immigration crisis. To the boot, the article emphasizes the effect is not really protectionist.
For example, US agriculture like soy beans lost the China market, but China has alternatives able to pick up capacity like from Brazil. Soy Beans aren't a highly refined or engineered product, just a crop that can be grown in bulk in many places around the world. Although the tariffs may now be pushing Apple to source for other countries, there is no in place alternative for a refined, highly engineered good like an iPhone. Short term Apple is hit hard and long term may move to be impacted less, but at the end of the day consumers see higher costs due to the import tax and long term price increases as Apple has to make back their investment in a diversified supply chain. Meanwhile, Us farmers won't get that soy bean market back for many years which will have serious repercussions in that industry.
As a geopolitical tool for trade negotiation a tariff is not great, especially if misused or over used. In this case, targeted tariffs could be an extra straw on top of negotiations to push through a final deal or late stage negotiation. Instead it has been a hammer/nail situation without complexity. Think of it more as the flashy dinner with open bar to seal the deal and less a first time around the table tactic. With the Mexico tariff being a bluff given Mexico had already agreed to discuss or take actions before the tweet was even made, it is feasible the current administration could be smarter about their trade policies or at least try to add nuance to benefit their cards in negotiations. There are better ways of getting someone to the table namely targeted sanctions that don't tax you own citizens or wipe out agricultural exports. As others have said here, there is more than enough material to impose sanctions in many sectors like stolen IP/technologies, human rights violations and concerns, military posturing, and more. Simplifying trade negotiation to tariff this and tariff that is not only a poor tool and negotiation tactic but also damaging to our economy, directly and in the short and long term. We come out behind pretty much regardless of what deal is made, if any.
Only in the pathological case when most or all imports of the particular good is under the tariffs.
Just for sake of example, suppose for a second America had diversified source of steel; four distinct countries each supplying about 25% of imports. Suppose a tariff was laid on the Chinese imports only. Would the prices of other imports move up? A bit, but much, much less than the tariff. Competition does wonders.
OTOH, if the only significant source of imports is from China -as is the case right now- well yes, in that case the americans will end up paying. Luckily this also creates positive pressure to diversify sources - which in a longer run will make imports much more competitively priced. Doubly luckily, the money raised on tariffs goes into the governmental budget, which means it gets spent back into the american economy anyway (minus the inefficiency of the government).
For now. Post Brexit that may be a completely different story. It is hard for me to imagine Europe without the single market and its advantages, I recently ordered something from Japan and it has been held up in customs for weeks now.
We're going to be living with the clusterfuck for a long time, one way or another.
The classic example is what meat to buy for dinner: beef has gotten expensive, so it's time to grab the chicken or pork this week. Your choice to choose an alternative to beef will help bring the price back down. We could take the example further to other people's choices, the butcher's response to reduced demand, etc, but we'll stop with: the economy is vastly complex, and all changes in conditions produce complex responses.
(Horribly busted on Firefox :( )
If I had a company I would be very hesitant to build up US capacity because there is a good chance the tariffs will be removed again soon. I think right now everything is in limbo which is not good for anybody.
Tariffs can be influential in trade negotiation but must be used like a scalpel, skillfully restricting trade in areas that don't cripple domestic industry while pressuring the other economy. this is incredibly difficult against such a large trading partner as China without building up alternative supply of goods or shoring up domestic capacity first. Blanket Tariffs, unless against a small country with small or specific exports, will hurt everyone involved much more than an existing deal. Meanwhile, promises of future gains from a new deal are just that, promises by politicians who already have the largest record of lying to the public and blocking any transparency like in the documented obstruction of the special counsel investigation. Usually, the costs are never made up by future gains and promises fall short if reveal themselves at all.
For steel, it may be that different countries have taken to what they can make the most profit from, diversifying production globally to meet demand. Domestic industry compensates for foreign competition by either doing it better/cheap/more profitable or specializing in ways that competitors can't like massive production of cheap steel foreign competition can't match touch due to high shipping costs or developing and producing a specialty steel that nobody else can match. If this specialization moves to an extreme so one type isn't made domestically at all, that's going to hit consumers and industry hard. It will take time to increase capacity or shift production, potentially away from more profitable and established goods, to meet demand. That lapse in supply could be huge, give US companies a cheap way into that market, but at the cost of further government intervention, higher taxes, and a step away from capitalism which allowed countries to specialize and decrease costs long term. In this example, that supply drop opened an opportunity to other countries like Russia who are conveniently dropping millions on a project in Kentucky. If US steel can't compensate and foreign groups are able to push into the domestic market anyway, what does the tariff do to help domestic industry at all?
We are in limbo then, with goods sitting around or being taxed higher to hopefully get a better deal than what exists. If that falls through, we are all much worse off from all this.
We could easily be in a situation where we're paying more for Japanese steel (for example) with not much benefit to US steel workers.
India is extremely protectionist with steel, but even it, with its own construction boom going on, gets overflown with semi-legally imported Chinese steel.
[1] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...
Legally, do they belong there, "many" of them have been sentenced by a jury or judge; though often not with a jury thanks to aggressive plea bargaining.
Do the prisons also have a legal obligation to protect prisoners from undue harm like rape?
But it also points to issues in our legal system. When the per capita number of warrants in Ferguson is > 1.5. When 3 strike laws and mandatory minimums lead to life in prison for non-violent offenders.
But also, if 4% of death row inmates are innocent; do we suppose that number is higher or lower for lesser sentences? for those that took plea deals? For those where the police have been corrupt.
https://www.newsweek.com/one-25-executed-us-innocent-study-c...
Little and low quality food so that sheriffs could take the money https://www.al.com/opinion/2018/03/49_alabama_sheriffs_flout...
Widespread prison rape https://www.hrw.org/news/2007/12/15/us-federal-statistics-sh...
Prisons under staffed and over crowded https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2017-07-26/...
Widespread use of solitary confinement https://cruxnow.com/church-in-the-usa/2019/04/20/solitary-co...
Chemical Castration in at least 8 states https://www.foxnews.com/politics/alabama-passes-bill-requiri...
I think it is important to keep the sense of proportion, things can be bad and require urgent action without being the worst. And saying things like: Trump is Hitler or human right violations in US are comparable to China do not help anyone. It just downplays the seriousness of the worst case and make the bad case look good.
China isn't waging war all over the world, so America is the worst case scenario right now.
We aren't the worst for human rights violations. But, it's not acceptable that sexual assault is a legitimate threat to the extent that it's the butt of every prison joke.
We don't have to be the worst to realize we need to fix our problems; but there are clearly people in this thread that are unaware of the issues.
But the bad things a country did do not reduce its right of truthfully pointing out bad things other countries are doing.
And why are you going back 200 years? Internment camps happened in the 40s and forced sterilization + syphylis guided as experiments happened into the 1980s... To free people, citizens even.
No; which is why I phrased it the way I did. This doesn't change the perception though because the U.S. stands out in the developed world of numbers we can trust.
The problem is that american citizens and businesses are heavily dependent on one specific source of imports -China- with little to no alternatives on certain goods [1]. It's a good long term aim to diversity the imports, but it needs to be done gradually, allowing sufficient time for american economy to adjust. Attempting to do that in one fell swoop would cause a lot of disruption and economic hardships to american citizenry.
Once the key imports are diversified, US will have much more room to put pressure on China, to curb their humanitarian abuses.
[1] China also holds a significant share of US bonds
As an American, I'd be willing to pay more for goods if it meant Tibetan Buddhists, Uighur Muslims and other folks in China had basic human rights.
‘Cheap stuff now, environmental disaster later’
Historically, the only thing that the West was ever able to successfully import into China was opium, and even that was a small window before native production became cheaper than shipping it all the way from India or Turkey. Over the long haul, China has had millenia-long trade surpluses, to the point that Roman writers were complaining about the trade through the Red Sea in spices and silks siphoning off their gold and silver, and later on so much of the silver of Mexico and Potosi ending up in China that it destabilized their bimetallic currency system.
* The US imprisons 4 times as many people than China per capita https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarce...
* Xinjiang Accounts for 21% of prison arrests
* The US has 2 million people in prison http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn2...
What is happening in China is an abomination, and political pressure is necessary. However the US should expect to be held to the same standards when applying political pressure, and it needs to resolve its own problems too.
Think less "all lives matter" and more walk and chew gum at the same time.
China condemning US won't change anything because the situation in US is the way it is because the people know and do not care enough about the issue. US condemning China would help because China tries to hide the truth from its own citizens who believe the camps are kind of schools where people learn history and get rid of religious superstitions.
By putting the false equivalence sign between these two situations you do disservice to both causes.
However if we look at percentage of population jailed for any reason, the US looks atrocious.
* The US has about 400,000 people jailed on remand, i.e. they have been accused of a crime but haven't made it to trial.
* About 1 in 6 of the black population is in jail (by my envelope calculation).
* 3 in 10 state prisoners developed symptoms of mental illness (with no recent history of mental illness).
Yes, US prisoners are not political prisoners.
Selecting "political prisoners" as the only category that deserves political pressure seems wrong to me.
https://agmetalminer.com/2019/06/19/this-morning-in-metals-u...
"We are idling two blast furnaces in the United States and one blast furnace in Europe to better align our global production with our order book."
This is just CNN / anti-Trump journalists trying to blame Trump.Not true at all. Agriculture, semiconductors, consumer electronics, and automotive are examples of other industries tariffs are designed to benefit. Steel is one of many.
They all benefit from tariffs. Further, by acting collectively it’s easier to get your own pork spending when you support others pork spending.
Get several groups who care a lot about their own issues and little for each other’s issues, and you can push polices that most people disagree with. Of course you need to be carful as alliances pool both support and opposition.
The tariffs were designed to hurt agriculture, or at least treat it as acceptable collateral damage. It was obvious the Chinese would retaliate by targeting US farmers, and then they did.
How is automotive supposed to benefit from tariffs against Mexico, which the industry heavily relies upon?
How do consumer electronics benefit from tariffs on Chinese electronics components when the tariffs simply force production to other non-US countries (where production plants are already ramped up)? Note that the tariffs on Chines components mean that US assembled consumer devices get taxed at 25%, but foreign (non Chinese) assemblers don’t.
Semiconductors are mostly made in the US, Japan, and South Korea. How do tariffs on Chinese goods help shore up US dominance there?
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/all-about-the-semiconduc...
Since Florida is a 'swing state', this will never change.
That’s currently less relevant at industrial scales where corn is a fine substitute even if it’s a slightly different chemical and not granular.
Same way that the decision of the "Party Central Committee" of The People's Republic of China to block Google helped Baidu.
China started this. 10 years later we're just now joining the fight.
If that's not tipping the scale, I don't know what is.
https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/04/golden-shield-proj...
Where did you get that timeframe from? I clearly remember the 2002 steel tariffs under the George W Bush administration [0]. The US' own research into that estimated the impact as:
"ranged between a gain of $65.6 million (0.0006% of GDP) to a loss of $110.0 million (0.0011% of GDP), "with a central estimate of a welfare loss of $41.6 million."
You're making it sound like the US has been this free-trade vanguard while the rest of the world ran rougshod over its principled nature.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_United_States_steel_tarif...
So. pretty trivial stuff.
You're making it sound like the US has been this free-trade vanguard
check : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tariff_ra...
U.S. is 161 out of 180 (180=lowest). So we are the leader of the free trade vanguard as far as large countries go.
I apologize "for making it sound like". That was not my intention. Perhaps you were eager to read that into it.
The reason every round of WTO trade talks takes years to complete is because of the dispute between rich world farmers and poor-world farmers. It's not just the US, but also the EU and their Common Agricultural Policy that leads to overproduction, waste and export of surpluses to poor countries at below market prices.
[0]https://outline.com/VB9gCX (link to a 2015 Economist article)
So yes, it's related to global demand -- global demand that went on a primary rollercoaster ride triggered by tariffs. And the news media is rightfully blaming the 1 person (not even party, singular person) for the consequences of their actions. What a sordid state of affairs indeed.
“In response to current market conditions, we are taking actions aligned with our strategy by adjusting our global blast furnace footprint,” the steelmaker said in a release.
Hmmm, I wonder what those "current market conditions" could possibly be? Also from the link you posted:
As the U.S. and China move toward a resumption of trade talks this month, China has lowered its tariff rates for some other countries, CNBC reported citing an analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
...
Last month, the U.S. raised tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese products, to which China responded with tariffs on $60 billion in U.S. goods.