My learned colleague Stuart mentioned to me yesterday that he saw an article in a trial subscription of Steel Business Briefing, that steel producers in the US “were exporting finished products overseas at under domestic prices.” Now if that wasn’t a hoot given all the squawking by US steel companies over foreign material entering the […]

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MetalMiner has always held a strong free market philosophy. Our belief is in most cases the benefits of lower cost material to consumers outweighs the damage to domestic producers that global trade can bring. In our experience, calls for anti- dumping fines, import tariffs or quotas are nearly always brought by large industrial producers.  The losers […]

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For those that follow the new LME Billet contract, or those that want to once we launch our new premium service, MetalMiner IndX (SM) which daily tracks this and many other metals, there has been a telling development in the prices over the last week few weeks or so. Amid continuous reports of rising steel costs, prices for […]

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Type in “Doha trade talks and steel” into Google and few if any articles appear. And yet I can’t help but fear that the latest round of Doha trade talks starting again this week may have profound long term implications on metals buyers across this country and elsewhere. First, a re-cap of Doha and who/what […]

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My hometown paper, The Chicago Tribune had a great little article on an anti-dumping case involving dry cleaner hangers. It’s interesting because everyone who takes their clothes to the dry cleaners will feel the pain of the ITC’s (International Trade Commission) ruling. Our government ruled in favor of the hanger producers here in the US […]

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What a mess the Chinese domestic coal industry is in. Criticized for an appalling safety record the government has made admirable strides in recent years to close the small and most dangerous coal mines. From 1995 to 2008 the number of mines has fallen by 80% to 16,000 today and at the same time the […]

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It’s an uncertain time in the freight market. Ocean imports are down, exports are up, domestic trucking is down in overall volume but up in intermodal as companies seek the economies of a rail/road mix at the expense of speed according to an article in Traffic World .
The problem comes from the inter related nature of […]

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The big three automakers have moved from public auctions to discrete swaps and return deals with the steel producers in return for new coil. They are fixing the prices via agreed upon formulas which presumably are more to the auto makers’ liking than the auction prices they were previously getting (and had expressed disappointment in). 
By […]

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Although metals and mining stocks have seen an average 40 percent appreciation since the beginning of the year, the same sector was hit with declines of approximately 16 percent during the past few trading days.
According to the Wall Street Journal, “Among the biggest decliners on the session were several metals and mining companies, even though […]

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Well one analyst is anyway. Liberum Capital released an interesting report to investors last week along the following lines which if correct we felt has some interesting observations for our readers.
Liberum drew initially on the significant falls in mining stocks with the sector down about 19% since May with heavy falls last week in US […]

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