Trump’s First Year Did Not Go As Expected for Steel Industry

SEATTLE (Scrap Monster):The first year of the Trump administration has been a counterintuitive one for steel companies.

President Donald Trump campaigned on a protectionist “America first” platform and promises to increase the number of steel jobs in the United States, and as recently as June, he said, “Wait till you see what I’m going to do for steel and your steel companies.” Though he has not backed away from those positions, his administration has been slow to act on them amid reports of disagreements within the White House about the risks and benefits of measures to limit imports. The Commerce Department, for example, still has not released a report on the Section 232 investigation of the impact of steel imports on national security that it began in April.

This has led to some disappointment among domestic steel producers who had expected Trump to quickly put up barriers to foreign steel. With the prospect of tariffs and other trade restrictions looming, though, non-U.S. companies have aggressively shipped steel to America, resulting in imports through the first 11 months of 2017 being 17.7 percent higher than they were during the same time the previous year.

In December, Nucor said that its fourth quarter earnings would be lower than expected because of “the import surge experienced in the summer of 2017.” This followed a September announcement by ArcelorMittal that it would lay off nearly three-fourths of its 207 workers at a plant in Conshohocken, Penn., a move the company blamed in part on “the ongoing surge of unfairly traded imports of steel.”

The New York Times quoted Alliance for American Manufacturing President Scott Paul as saying that he had “a profound sense of frustration that the president has been using steelworkers as political props.”

“The president’s own words and lack of action have actually put the industry in a worse position than if he had done nothing at all,” Paul said.

Courtesy: AIIS