Free Republic

China’s “whole steel industry has been bribed” by Rio Tinto, suggested a lead article in the China Daily newspaper on Wednesday that marks a sharp escalation in a dispute rocking the global steel and iron ore industries. The state-owned China Daily quoted an unnamed “industry insider” claiming Rio bribed each of the 16 Chinese steel companies involved in this year’s negotiations to set the benchmark iron ore price, a process that brings together steelmakers and suppliers of iron ore, steel’s key ingredient.

The American steel industry is enjoying a new era of prosperity [snip] Buoyed by sharply reduced employee costs, soaring global demand, dramatic consolidation that has tamped down cutthroat competition, and a weakened dollar that has made imports less attractive, steel prices have tripled in the past five years. For the first time in decades, companies operating in America have added capacity and workers. [snip] "There hasn't been this much building in 25 to 30 years," the president of Locker Associates, a steel consulting firm, Michael Locker, said. "We are in a new period here. I don't see us going back...

China steelmakers warn Australian miners of 'revenge': report Fri Apr 4, 2:37 AM ET China's top steelmakers' association has warned that Australian mining companies could face "revenge" over the aggressive pursuit of higher prices for iron ore, a report said Friday. "Buyers and sellers should not be hostile -- they should be interdependent," the deputy director-general of the powerful China Iron and Steel Association, Chen Xianwen, told the Australian Financial Review. "(But) if you have been aggressive, you can experience revenge in the future," Chen said in an interview in Beijing. The comments come as Anglo-Australian mining giants BHP Billiton...

Steel price increases and healthy corporate revenues during the first two quarters of 2004 are slowly translating into jobs. The steel industry turned out in force last week for the annual Steel Success Strategies conference in New York City. The number of participants jumped to more than 1,000 from 600 in 2003, when the industry appeared to be stagnating. Although it continued to founder for the first several months following the June event in 2003, the steel business picked up steam as it neared the end of 2003 and roared into the new year. As higher consumption brought increased orders...

U.S. Vehicle Sales Seen Edging Up in '04 Sat Jan 31, 5:59 PM ETU.S. new car and light truck sales are expected to increase this year as the economic recovery puts the pedal to the metal for the auto industry... Paul Taylor, chief economist at the National Automobile Dealers Association, said new vehicle sales will total about 16.8 million vehicles in 2004, up from 16.6 million in 2003. That would still mark a decline from the all-time high of 17.4 million vehicles sold in 2000, however, a banner year for an industry that accounts for roughly one-fifth of U.S....

The federal agency that insures pension plans said yesterday that its deficit had grown from $3.6 billion to $11.2 billion in just a year and that it would try to deal with the escalating problem by overhauling its own investments, among other measures. The agency, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, said that two consecutive years of record failures by corporate pension plans and continuing adverse market conditions left it with a shortfall much greater than a year earlier, which had been the previous low point in the agency's 30-year history. People briefed on the new investment plan say the agency...

A spurned suitor's last-minute attempt to obtain the Georgetown Steel plant has failed, and the bankruptcy of the plant's former parent company is marching to a conclusion. The winding down of the 2½-year-old case doesn't give much comfort to plant workers, though, because they still see the mill's fate as uncertain. "We're kind of cautious right now. We know the state of the economy we're in right now is depressed," said James Sanderson, president of United Steelworkers Local 7898. The company's managers are beginning to make payments and distribute the assets according to a plan approved June 12 in federal...

<p>His handpicked candidate for governor of California, the RINO (Republican in name only), liberal, Clinton-supporting former mayor of Los Angeles, Richard Riordan, suffered an 18-point drubbing by conservative Bill Simon (the son of the former Treasury secretary) in the March 5 Republican gubernatorial primary. Backing Mr. Riordan was the first serious political misstep of the Bush presidency, and one wonders how his political team could have so badly misread the conservative California Republican base.</p>