Businesses are passing along tariff costs, Fed reports

Who would have thought..

 

I deal with aluminum LME, what is steel through?

 

We saw this coming so we bought as much steel as we could possibly store from Cleveland Cliffs and others the first couple weeks of January before Trump’s inauguration. We’re going to have to buy steel again in Q3 unfortunately, even if only a relatively small amount.

 

Not sure what you mean? A company like Cleveland Cliffs is completely vertically integrated.

There’s the CRU that will tell you prices for rolled steel. We are a big enough player we never pay those prices since we negotiate big buys, but it gives you pretty good cost data.

 

I guess cru might be what I’m talking about then. We buy from several different anluminum extruders. It’s all based on LME or Midwest plus conversion. The LME is what it is, the conversion rate is what seperates them. I wasn’t sure how steel works. It would seem kind of vague to say aluminum went up x amount. That’s just not how it works. Wasn’t sure about steel.

 

Steel has been protected for 150 years under the commie arg of "national security". 1-3% of domestic steel is used by the military. Oh, & the military grade steel bought mostly from 2 plants in Penn is protected (as it prob should be) by the Defense Production Act.

Stupid ass policy - & we should all be in agreement. I will say Trump "allowing" the Nippon deal to go through - a total no-brainer - is a good thing. the fact that a president could stop it is gross!

I used to recall when fake conservatives at least but a tad of value on freedom. Now it's security, security, security. As if free(ish) mkts haven't been primary driver of security.

 

Agree with that, as well.

 

The company we just sold at the start of the year bought tens of millions of pounds of aluminum from Korean extruders annually. We always negotiated prices with them. I don’t think the LME was ever used directly for pricing but as an argument to say they could get it cheaper. Part of why we didn’t use the LME directly is that we bought not just extruded profiles but had them fabricated and painted too so the price per pound included labor too.

 

We are in that ballpark as far as volume, we just buy mostly domestic and powder it in house. I guess my point was that the only thing that separates any extruder is their conversion rate. It’s just added on top of the LME and Midwest. That’s the number you pay. Aluminum got tariffs just like steel did but it’s not like it just went up 25 percent. That’s not how it works. It’s a traded commodity