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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Les H who wrote (18396)	3/10/2004 10:23:24 AM
From: Les H	Respond to of 306849

EU directive allows companies to raid private homes for evidence of infringement of intellectual property news.bbc.co.uk

To: Les H who wrote (18396)	3/10/2004 11:59:05 AM
From: GraceZ	Respond to of 306849

A surge in steel prices helps "integrated steel mills", the least efficient part of the American industry, because they barely use scrap and can enjoy the higher prices commanded by steel. But steel "minimills", which rely heavily on scrap to produce steel, have been hit hard. One of the reasons the big integrated steel companies had a hard time competing with the small mini mills is because the mini mills didn't even try to do the least efficient process (also the process with the highest environmental damage) which is taking the raw iron ore to the stage where it can be turned into steel, called sintering. They didn't bother to build coking mills (even if they could get them past environmental restrictions). The world was awash with cheap scrap steel so they cherry picked the last part of the process, now that practice is coming back to bite them. The process of coking and sintering hasn't progressed very far beyond where it was in the dawn of the industrial age (although the Chinese have some pretty modern plants) and the integrated steel mills in this country are almost dead from having lost the most profitable part of the process going to the mini mills, the rolling. Plus they never made the transition to casting which a more efficient way to make finished steel parts because it doesn't involve the reheating that rolling does. Aluminum has a similar problem. It is far cheaper to use recycled aluminum than it is to mine and then convert that raw material to usable. This has been feasible only because aluminum has a very high recycle rate. High scrap prices for steel will increase recycling before it prompts companies to increase the production of that preliminary step. The only thing that solves this dilemma is persistently higher prices. I say persistent because persistently higher prices is the only thing that will convince companies to spend the money to invest in increasing capacity and more modern technology in that part of the process after a 20+ year slump in prices.