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Strategies & Market Trends : Zeev's Turnips - No Politics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Boca_PETE who wrote (35096)	2/28/2002 8:27:01 PM
From: dvdw©	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 99280

Please Pete: Your Projecting your values, not thinking about the true Supply demand equation for steel. Give us a break. Steel is weak and why shouldnt it be? World wide glut. Soviets can export steel with transportation and beat the US producer price. So what if they do a 40% tariff, guess what, it wont matter. Demand is shifting, new technology is coming on stream to replace steel in maybe 40% of it's now entrenched applications. So even with the Tariff the outlook for steel is bleak. NUCOR by way of example is Specialty steel and that demand will remain, but bulk commodity steel, the laws of comparative advantage show that we are not the low cost producer anymore and thats all there is too it. I'd devote my time to finding out what that might be if you want to make money. RO/RX=CF

To: Boca_PETE who wrote (35096)	3/1/2002 4:10:30 AM
From: Psycho-Social	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 99280

Re: implementation of a 40% Tariff on steel as trigger for Market decline. Its true that the Smoot-Hawley tariff was a key aspect of the Great Depression and just recently I was reviewing some exerpts I copied from the WSJ and found that the House or Senate passage of tariffs in the days before the '29 Crash probably helped cause that Crash. Now, Steel is a less important part of the economy and the U.S. is not likely to turn broadly protectionist, but the Markets tend to do poorly when there's govt intervention in the free market arena. Therefore, if Bush does impose tariffs on foreign steel, it could cause a downleg, especially since most economists don't believe foreign companies are actually guilty of "dumping". U.S. companies have just failed to achieve comparable improvements in productivity that have helped other industries offset cheaper foreign labor costs.