steel on 60 minutes

[ryan costa]

circumstances of the U.S. Steel industry were discussed on CBS 60 Minutes last night.

Nucor and Caterpillar were highlighted. a transcript of the story is at

http://www.nucor.com/voice/headlines/article/60minutes/

Nucor seeks to benefit from the "Buy America" clause of the stimulus package funding for U.S. infrastructure spending. it is reported all of Nucor's U.S. plants are non-Union, with compensation applied to performance: it is like something Peter Drucker would come up with.

Nucor achieved success without the Protectionism, Isolationism, and direct subsidies to Steel-buying corporations(railroads) that Andrew Carnegie enjoyed.

Caterpillar has plants all over the world. it wants to buy cheap steel from overseas and sell more products overseas. there is no reason to believe China won't be producing vehicles for most of the uses Caterpillar does for much less than caterpillar does within a few years. the entire gist of the "information age" is that each incremental advance in technology is less profitable than the previous one, and your own R&D subsidizes competitors, and most of the useful stuff as already been invented.

The U.S. steel industry collapsed about 10 years ago in the wake of dumping. much cheap steel from eastern europe, china, korea, and mexico was dumped on the U.S. it drove down market prices. it helps that it is much easier for U.S. financiers to capitalize steel mills in korea, china, Mexico, etc, than in Andrew Carnegie's day.

The domestic steel industry recovered when China applied its Wal-Mart-era money to great domestic spending, and also producing more stainless steel salad bowls for sale at Target. This sucked up a lot of overseas steel before it reached America.

The goal of the globalists, they explain, is to grow the economies of the rest of the world so they can consume like us. whether like we did in the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, or the 1990s, or the 2000s. We may reach the point when when it is as easy in the rest of the world for most people to drive a car with giant stereo speakers and eat enough to weigh 300 pounds as it is in America. It is more likely that, before that point is reached, oil will once again be bid up to 150 bucks a barrel. the price of grains and soybeans(already heavily subsidized) will triple. What was the point of any of it? There was no point. it is a failure of policy, a failure of ideology, a failure of knowledge. a few more folks will become billionaires before that point is reached though. and many modern corporate officers will walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars each before their companies need billion dollar bailouts.