steel

Submitted by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

It’s unclear what China was thinking when it borrowed all those trillions to quadruple its capacity to make steel, cement and other basic industrial products. There’s no record of it checking in with the other countries that have such industries to see if a sudden surge of cheap imports was okay with them.

Turns out that it’s not. The US in particular seems to lack a sense of humor where the death of its steel industry is involved:

Now that China's brief infatuation with "rationalizing" excess capacity in its massively glutted (and insolvent) steel sector is over after lasting all of 2-3 months, China is back to doing what it did in late 2015 (and what it has always done) when as we reported, a surge in Chinese exports led to the first salvos in the trade war between China - the world's biggest exporter of various steel products and is responsible for half the entire world's steel output - and countries who are importing dumped Chinese products at the expense of their own steel and mining industries.

Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,

If you want to know why we have a $19 trillion national debt and a fiscal structure that will take that already staggering figure to $35 trillion and 140% of GDP within a decade, just consider the latest campaign fracas. That is, the shrieks of disbelief in response to Donald Trump’s sensible suggestion that the Europeans pay for their own defense.

Two weeks ago, when looking at the latest import price index data, we showed something disturbing: China has become an all out exporter of deflation. As the chart below shows, In November, import prices from China decreased 1.5% over the past 12 months, the largest year-over-year drop since the index declined 1.7% for the year ended in January 2010.