Posted on 04/25/2016 12:33:00 PM PDT by huldah1776
Cheap steel from China has been blamed for distorting global markets and putting other countries' steelmakers under pressure. How have we got here and why does it all matter? China's steel industry - what's the problem?
Chinese steel production has expanded hugely. Over the past 25 years, output has grown more than 12-fold. By comparison, the EU's output fell by 12% while the US's remained largely flat.
The drive behind that stellar increase has been China's double-digit economic growth over the past decades. That led to ever more domestic demand for steel and the government invested heavily in the industry during the boom years.
But that demand has been severely hit by the current slowdown, leaving China with more steel than it needs.
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Chinese steel is therefore sold on the international market at extremely low prices - critics say it's sold at a loss. As a consequence, other countries' steel plants find it increasingly hard to compete.
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A simple response would be setting up higher import tariffs....Steel-producing countries India, the US and Indonesia have already raised their import tariffs on steel from China.
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Is there a national security question?
Steel is crucial for the defence industry - just think ships, planes or tanks. So there's the question of whether it is wise to shut down domestic production and import all steel.
Even if it is cheaper to do so, there is the question of whether you want to depend entirely on imports when it comes to one of the ingredients you need for national defence.
Any intentional or unintentional cut in supply could quickly leave you in a vulnerable position.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Only US steel should be used for our defense. Period.
China produces 822 million tons of steel each year. That’s more than the next 15 largest steel producers combined.
I wonder how much is new steel and how much recycled?
“The Arsenal of democracy”,closed for remodeling.
Our presidents have most always had the authority to impose tariffs in such circumstances. I don't know the details and and I doubt Americans do, but a lot more could be done than has been done in past decades.
Some of the authority might have been surrendered in some trade agreements, or might be in the future. Those are things our politicians don't like to talk about.
I wish Trump would get into some factual details about what our president is empowered to do now and put that in his speeches.
I think we should produce everything that does into all our military equipment and material and assembly it all here.
Some of their metals are radioactive. Check your new “silverware!”
had to do some research. I’m a million times worse than eve. This was interesting if not partial...
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9C03EFDB1339EF3ABC4952DFBE668389639EDE
otherwise, wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffs_in_United_States_history
opinion on history (always interesting)
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/truth-about-trade-history
Just read The Truth about Trade in History.
“Economists and historians continue to debate how important the Smoot-Hawley tariff was in causing the Great Depression.11 Whatever the degree, the effect certainly was adverse and the tariff was certainly bad policy. As Figure 2 indicates, world trade virtually collapsed following passage of the Smoot-Hawley tariff. Thus, if that tariff was not the single cause of the Great Depression, it certainly made a bad situation worse.”
oops.
Amen !
If there's a way to adulterate steel the Chinese will do it.
I would never trust any Chinese product in a critical role, bridges, towers, defense. Crazy if we do.
We haven't learned our lesson with foodstuffs yet. Really crazy.
probably inferior, defective and the US Gov will use in our interstate bridges ...........just sayin
Here an article I've posted often before. Fairly long, but it presents the money supply and Fed case very well.
The great depression and its offspring, the New Deal, could both have been avoided if the Federal Reserve had performed the task assigned to it. All the Federal Reserve had to do to avoid the Depression and the subversion of the American constitutional order was to purchase $1 billion in government securities during the 10-month period from December 1929 to October 1930. The result would have been an increase, instead of decrease, in high-powered money, and the banking crisis that began in the autumn of 1930 would not have occurred.
The Fed's "Depression" and the Birth of the New Deal
Rather than increasing the money supply, Fed decisions decreased it severely.
Interesting links. I scanned them, but didn’t see anything specific about what powers the US president has at present to address unfair or illegal trade practices. I believe the president still can take some actions on his own, but probably less than in the past.
Still, I wish I knew authoritatively what power a president has these days to address trade matters. I might try to research it more soon.
I guess I just don’t get “money supply.” But I will read the article now...LOL
It's basically just all the cash and readily available funds in the bank and investment accounts of all individual and businesses and government in a country. You can read the first few paragraphs here and have a good idea.
And the Fed primarily caused the GD because when the runs began on the banks started, the Fed did not increase liquidity by making more funds available to banks at reasonable rates.
Some older ancestors of mine gave as good an explanation of the GD as any I've heard: "Nobody had any money." And that was largely correct and the Fed left it that way early on and things got worse and worse.
In 1930 trade was a tiny part of the US economy. Smoot-Hawley meme is a blatant rewriting of history. It is almost comical and certainly Goebbelesque.
My gold foil paranoia hat is spinning here and if you don’t hear from me, they found me and took me out.
So they were actually forcing the bad economy and used the results to start the path to marxism and government control?
Question. “They” can tank the world economy any time they want right? What are they waiting for?
Who is they?
increasingly, material Test Reports require “Country of Melt”
project specifiers are rejecting steel with country of melt other than North America, Europe and Japan
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