Last week India imposed a 20% tariff on a number of hot rolled steel products to "safeguard" domestic production. According to the Business Standard this has lead domestic producers to drop their customarily negotiated discounts and begin charging customers according to their actual published price sheets (archived). Earlier this month the United States began an investigation (archived) into hot rolled steel products of their own and have just announced that based on early findings they intend to continue the investigation (archived) as imports appear to impose "harm" on US producers in their determination through low prices. The US can be expected to follow India in introducing protectionist tariffs on hot rolled steel soon. As a larger tend expect bureaucracy heavy states struggling to support domestic industry such as the United States and India to begin ramping up their imposition of protectionist tariffs in an effort to keep the remains of their domestic production capacity from being gutted.
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A) India is easily the world's dominant power in steel products, with Mittal dude controlling plants from Romania to the US all the way into Pakistan etc. Here's a fact : you can not have anything even vaguely similar to "modern civilisation" without steel. It, more than plumbing, is what made the high density urban settlement possible.
B) China has not been playing along with the "free trade" notions of the WTO, reducing the entire arrangement to ruins. It started with "IP sharing" agreements, twenty years ago (except China's not sharing the derivatives they make with the original holders – which is why IBM survives as a real estate agent these days) and continued with "ecology" rare earth export quotas a decade ago. By now it's ripe for explosion.
In their slickstream, India is going out of the whole deal, which is leading the US to respond in kind. A new age of mercantilism is upon us, and the importance of this cultural shift is impossible to understate. There's no nook or cranny of the current vulgate that may stand without free trade, because everything – EVERYTHING, from the notion that niggers are people to the expectation that women may speak in public to the proposition that you should have enough to eat to the concept of a "brand" – is predicated on free trade. Every single obviousness, whichever you may, is not only unlikely to survive the shift – but likely not even meaningful at all in a mercantilist world.
Interesting times.
Thank you, I'm glad Qntra has a reader who understands why this and not any other commodity story clogging the pipes was selected.
@BB s/reader/Qntra board member ;p
Not really exclusive
Sure, but saying "my chinese friend came over for dinner last night" wholly undersells the fact that Xi Jinping came over and brought his naggy wife too.
Underselling is good and wholesome.