re: US steel industry YT rabbit hole

China is asshoe

I ran a crane at a steel mill in Decatur, Al. that went bankrupt and closed in March, 2001, after George Bush jr. refused to place tariffs on steel from China. It was a very good job.
The mill closed the following day after bush's decision, and everyone lost their job. It was an almost new mill, that cost almost a billion dollars to build.
After a few years, Nucor bought the mill cheap and reopened it, I had already moved on though.

Trump was right. Bring industry back.

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Still a little bit amazing you can make a relatively low priced commodity so heavy across the globe and ship it here and still be competitive.

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Chinese govt subsidizes steel, aluminum, stainless and pegs the yuan right below the dollar. Currency manipulation has as much to do with it as cheap labor. They also do not have to follow any environmental regulations.

Other foreign govts subsidize the mills as well. That is why Trump put in the tariffs to level the field and the Potato will remove them to weaken the economy.

Massive steel mills north of Mobile Al and they are expanding.

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Detroit was once one of the wealthiest cities in the world and was home to incredible architecture.

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I remember the heyday of the US catfish industry here. In the 80s and 90s. There was so much money being invested into it that it was like a gold rush. People would travel here from big cities looking for landowners asking if they needed money to build ponds. I knew black men who never made more than 30k a year that started doing custom oxygen checking for farmers at night by owning a truck and a 500 dollar oxygen meter that were bringing in 250k a year. Farmers put ponds in production and became multi millionaires. Huge catfish processing operations like Farm Fresh and Delta Pride had processing plants all over, you’d have 18 wheelers lined up 2 miles loaded with fish at 5 am every morning on highway 49. Delta Pride at its peak processed 1 million lbs a day. We had 189,000 water acres processing 660 million lbs a year. Farmers drove Lincolns on their ponds instead of trucks, had private planes, kids drove sport cars. Illegal back room casinos everywhere. Parties every weekend at farm shops with crawfish, live bands, strippers.

Humphreys county was top 20 wealthiest counties per capita in the country. Now it’s among the poorest. Govt started letting cheap imports of pangasius and swai from China and Vietnam in 2002 enter the country and it drove the price of catfish down while feed and fuel steady went up. Processors and farms went out of business.

Today we are down to 65,000 acres and process 300-320 million lbs a year industry wide. The industry declined in acreage every year from 2003 to 2017. Then under Trump we saw it grow in acreage 5% in 2018 and again 2019 and hit 350 million lbs processed for first time in 8 years. Fact is in a strong economy Americans will choose the American product.

But we decided to shut the nation down over a cold and that mean tweets are more important. Now it’s getting so bad with inflation and pressure from imports if it doesn’t improve in a year or two the rest of the industry could very well collapse.

There is a book by Mike McCall called Catfish Days that goes into the entire history of the industry and it’s really interesting for those who like these types of things. It’ll blow your mind how crazy it used to be

Can you new mills produce as much as the old ones I wonder, I have to go back and watch it again but the Indiana plant produced something like 30 tons of steel an HOUR at peak if I am remembering correctly.

I am sure they can produce higher quality steel which was an issue with the really old mills.

And correct, in the O&G industry steel for major products can only be from certain countries and china isnt one.

Another thing that I read was that all through the 2000s something like 90% of the scrap metal bought in the US was by the Chinese because they knew it was higher grade than they could make and they could get it cheap.

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Still a little bit amazing you can make a relatively low priced commodity so heavy across the globe and ship it here and still be competitive.

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People crying about living wages should go demand China and India and SE Asia pay them.

Need to get more mills built out just like fertilizer and REMs production.

Same for mills producing rail, they can't keep up with demand currently and what is out there is higher the hell. Lots of non-domistic (most from China) rail out there but a lot of projects require domestic only material, that cost is just getting passed down the line.