A move toward more monopoly in the steel industry might help northern Minnesota and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. If that sounds like heresy coming from an economist, let me explain.
The steel industry, and regional iron mines, would benefit financially from consolidation into fewer firms. Paradoxically, this need not result in greater monopoly power. Hence steel users, including the average household, need not fear.
U.S. steel firms, like steel producers around the world, are financially battered. Some U.S. firms, including industry leaders U.S. Steel and Bethlehem, might be more viable if they merged and restructured their production facilities.
Historically, U.S. antitrust policy has opposed any mergers between large firms that would reduce competition in any sector. A generation ago, or even a decade ago, the idea of the nation’s two largest steel firms merging would have set off alarm bells in the Justice Department and Congress.
But in an environment of relatively free international trade, what once would have been monopolistic concentration within any one nation no longer confers monopoly power to control output and raise prices. Steel imports can provide all the competitive discipline that the U.S. economy needs for this sector.
And merged, financially healthier firms might be better positioned to invest in new technologies, such as basic reduction iron, that might benefit the Great Lakes iron ranges.
The world’s steel industry suffers from excess capacity. In this country steel capacity first grew with railroads and then with the automobile industry. World War II strongly boosted steel demand for shipping and arms. At the same time, bombing destroyed much steel capacity in Europe and Japan.
But after the war, Germany, France, England and Japan all set a high priority on replacing steel capacity that had been destroyed during the war. At the same time, developing nations such as Brazil, India, and Peru all built steel mills as signs of industrial progress. For the former Soviet Union and China, building a steel industry was a Leninist imperative. And as colonies in Asia and Africa gained independence, building a mill was a potent symbol of nationhood.
All of this left the world drowning in steel capacity by the end of the century. Blame was widespread. Some nations did subsidize their steel industries highly for political reasons. In the United States and Europe, decades of oligopoly and import protection had turned steel companies into complacent bureaucracies.
Union work rules and behavior fostered sluggishness with management’s blessing. Pittsburgh journalist John Hoerr gave a particularly pointed description of union and management shortsightedness in his 1988 book, “And the Wolf Finally Came.”
In the United States, upstart firms such as Nucor and Cargill subsidiary North Star Steel built electric minimills that were profitable at drastically lower prices than those posted by the old line firms.
Moreover, while steel firms abused the anti-dumping complaint process for all they were worth, successive U.S. presidents and congresses chose to allow increasing levels of steel imports.
All of this led to financial pressures on many old-line firms, USX, Bethlehem, National, LTV and WHC (better known as Wheeling-Pittsburgh) are all in trouble. Bethlehem and LTV are already in Chapter 11. Earlier this month, Bethlehem and USX confirmed that they are in merger talks. Antitrust officials apparently will not raise a stink.
Regardless of any eventual mergers, one factor hangs over all the traditional firms—pension costs. USX now has five pensioners for every one active employee. Other firms have even worse ratios. These “legacy” personnel costs will cloud these firms’ income and balance sheets for decades unless they are somehow dumped on taxpayers shoulders. But that is another story.
Just this week there are reports of a new firm interested in establishing a direct-reduction iron facility with an electric minimill at Nashwauk in northern Minnesota.
Such new technology, which consolidates the whole production cycle from raw ore to finished steel on one site, may save enough in energy and transportation costs to give U.S. iron mines another generation of life.
The likelihood that such proposed investment actually occurs would be greater if consolidation or liquidation of the industry’s dinosaurs actually happens.
Right now these firms are industrial zombies—entities that are no longer completely alive yet not dead.
Their uncertain status and the uncertainty of any government action to hasten or retard their death or resuscitation cast a pall over the whole industry.
© 2001 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.