Miercoles 11/28/12 Libro beige

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Miercoles

Eventos economicos

Habla Sandra Pianalto
Solicitudes de hipotecas
Ventas de casas nuevas
Reporte del petroleo
Libor beige

Sandra Pianalto Speaks

MBA Purchase Applications
7:00 AM ET


New Home Sales
10:00 AM ET


EIA Petroleum Status Report
10:30 AM ET

Daniel Tarullo Speaks
12:15 PM ET



5-Yr Note Auction
1:00 PM ET


Beige Book
2:00 PM ET

[admin]

El libro beige nos dara una mejor idea de como anda la economia en todas sus regiones en US.

[admin]

Copper November 27,20:38
Bid/Ask 3.5269 - 3.5284
Change -0.0002 -0.01%
Low/High 3.5218 - 3.5327
Charts

Nickel November 27,20:38
Bid/Ask 7.6055 - 7.6096
Change -0.0041 -0.05%
Low/High 7.6028 - 7.6423
Charts

Aluminum November 27,20:37
Bid/Ask 0.8864 - 0.8868
Change -0.0005 -0.05%
Low/High 0.8850 - 0.8878
Charts

Zinc November 27,20:38
Bid/Ask 0.8874 - 0.8878
Change -0.0017 -0.19%
Low/High 0.8870 - 0.8903
Charts

Lead November 27,20:35
Bid/Ask 0.9936 - 0.9959
Change -0.0040 -0.40%
Low/High 0.9926 - 0.9983

[admin]

Treasurys Price Chg Yield %
2-Year Note -0/32 0.274
10-Year Note 1/32 1.635
* at close

8:32 p.m. EST 11/27/12Futures Last Change Settle
Crude Oil 87.11 -0.07 87.18
Gold 1740.6 -1.7 1742.3
E-mini Dow 12839 -23 12862
E-mini S&P 500 1394.25 -3.25 1397.50

8:43 p.m. EST 11/27/12Currencies Last (mid) Prior Day †
Japanese Yen (USD/JPY) 81.94 82.16
Euro (EUR/USD) 1.2930 1.2944
† Late New York trading.

[admin]

Asia-Pacific
Index Name Value Change % Change Time
Nikkei 225 9,366.83 -56.47 -0.60% 20:30:45
Hong Kong Hang Seng Index 21,724.36 -119.67 -0.55% 20:36:00
S&P/ASX 200 4,436.20 -21.93 -0.49% 20:34:07

[admin]

US considera reglas mas estrictas para los bancos extranjeron que funcionan en su territorio. Terrible.

[admin]

US una vez mas se queda corto en llamar a China: manipulador de su moneda.

[admin]

Los futures del Dow Jones 24 puntos a la baja.

Au down 1,740.40

Oil down 86.12

[admin]

El Hang Seng -0.67%, el Shanghai C. -0.71%, el Nikkei -0.72%, Korea -0.92%, Australia -0.49%

[admin]

Euro down 1.2930

Yen up 81.85

[admin]

Hay excesiva produccion de acero en el mundo. La produccion de acero mundial les de 1.8 billones tons y las ordenes son de solo 1.5 billones de tons.
--------------------

Global Steel Industry Faces Capacity Glut

By JOHN W. MILLER

Global steel has a big problem: It's too big and it's getting bigger.

This year, steel mills around the world have a production capacity of 1.8 billion tons but will take orders for only 1.5 billion tons. And instead of consolidating and becoming more efficient, the industry is building still more capacity.

By 2016, an estimated 100 new mills, with total estimated supply capacity of 350 million tons, are expected to come on stream, according to industry executives and consultants. Companies in Vietnam, Argentina, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, all backed in some way by their governments, are building or planning new mills.

Xinhua/Zuma Press
Stainless steel coil in China, where steel production has boomed.

Officials in these countries say they want to invest in industrial development, supply homegrown steel to their manufacturers and cut imports. But what may appear to be welcome developments for local economies has reverberations through a global industry.

"You see people wanting to build new facilities all the time, all over the world," says Dan DiMicco, CEO of Nucor Corp., NUE -1.44% the second-biggest U.S. steelmaker, and a proponent of more consolidation.

"You can argue about what needs to happen next," said Charles Bradford, an analyst with New York-based Bradford Research Inc. "But no question: there is too much capacity."

Getting a definite count on the number of steel mills in the world and actual production capacity is difficult in large part, say industry officials and analysts, because there are hundreds of small, uncounted mills in China, which accounts for 46% of world steel output. Estimates for the number of steel mills in China range from 600 to 800 mills.

The oversupply issue has reduced steel prices and profits, as seen in the latest round of earnings, and led to renewed calls for consolidation and rationalization among industry officials and investors. ArcelorMittal, MT -2.32% which is the world's largest steelmaker by output but only has 6% of the global market, reported a loss of $709 million in the third quarter. CEO Lakshmi Mittal has said he believes the industry is far too fragmented and that the company would remain focused on consolidation "as long as the right opportunities arise."

But at this point, there appears to be little industry progress toward doing so—and much opposition politically from governments.

Mr. Mittal met Tuesday with French President François Hollande to discuss options for an embattled company steel plant in eastern France, including a possible state takeover of the plant. The company wants to close two idled blast furnaces at the plant by Dec. 1 if the government doesn't find a buyer for the furnaces by then. The French government said it would be difficult to sell them without ArcelorMittal's other factory at the plant, which the company wants to keep. That has prompted Paris to consider temporarily nationalizing the entire plant until a buyer for it is found.

In a statement after their meeting, Mr. Hollande said he presented all options to Mr. Mittal and added he wanted the talks between the government and company to continue until Saturday.

Earlier this year in Serbia, the government chose to buy a failing mill from U.S. Steel Corp. X -1.62% for $1 rather than see it go under. It is now looking for a buyer.

With commodity and stock prices low, this is a rough climate for metal and mining mergers and acquisitions: The total value of deals in the sector was down 43% in the first nine months of 2012, to $76.8 billion from $133.7 billion in the first nine months of 2011, according to Ernst&Young. ThyssenKrupp AG TKA.XE +0.56% has so far been unsuccessful in selling a state-of-the-art steel mill in Brazil and a processing plant in Alabama—each with a capacity of five million tons—that it built for a combined $11.8 billion in 2007. The firm's struggles to sell the two plants, built with tax breaks and subsidies, illustrates how steel companies and governments are overinvesting in new capacity they then struggle to find use for.

The trillion-dollar-a-year global steel industry is expected to remain, for the foreseeable future, the most fractured of major industries. The world's top five steel companies control only 18.2% of global steel supply. By contrast, the world's top five car companies control 50.6% of the global market. And the world's top five sellers of seaborne iron ore— iron ore that is exported by ocean trade routes—account for 66.1% of that market.

"Steel needs a major player to buy underperforming mills and shut them down," says Tim Cahill, a Dublin-based analyst for J&E Davy Holdings Ltd.

Without that, he says, steelmakers lack economies of scale needed to gain significant savings in transportation and production, or muscle in negotiating with both raw-material suppliers and customers such as auto and appliance makers.

Prices of hot-rolled coil steel in the U.S. have fallen over 35% to $636 a ton from over $1,000 a ton before the 2008 financial crisis. That price decline occurred even as the nation's fourth-biggest steelmaker, RG Steel Corp., filed for bankruptcy in May. The company is in bankruptcy liquidation proceedings, taking 7.5 million tons of capacity, or 9% of U.S. domestic production in 2011, off the market.

Meanwhile, governments continue to subsidize mills, despite weakening demand, to maintain jobs and sustain local economies.

Wolfgang Eder, CEO of Austrian steelmaker Voestalpine AG VOE.VI +1.40% and president of the European Steel Association, has called for European politicians to organize a coordinated scheme of capacity-cutting.

"The steel industry could fall back into the mistake of the 1980s, in which it would demand subsidies and keep obsolete plants running for social and political reasons," he said in a recent interview.

But Thomas Veraszto, a vice president at Russia's OAO Severstal, SVST.LN -1.46% said closing a mill, especially when the economy is weak, is difficult.

"It's very easy to open a steel mill in good times and very difficult to close it in bad times," he said. Moreover, mergers are particularly difficult in the steel business. "To do a merger, you have to clearly create more value," he said. "That is usually not the case in steel, where you can increase capacity just by running your existing assets better."

The steel industry owes its fractured nature, in part, to its historic role as an economic engine. "No nation has ever industrialized without developing its own steel industry," said David Hounshell, a professor of industrial history at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Each region had its own mill to supply local industries. Once built, they become a source of jobs, which were protected with tariffs and subsidies. "The end result is always a lot of overcapacity," Mr. Hounshell said.

In China, where thousands of small mills have sprung up to make the steel bars, beams and other construction materials for new cities and skyscrapers, the government wants the top 10 producers to account for 60% of the country's steel output by 2015 and 70% by 2020, up from around 50% today.

The government wants to get rid of old unproductive and polluting facilities and give the remaining steelmakers "more clout in dealing with the foreign raw-material suppliers," said Mr. Bradford, the steel analyst. "But it's a difficult goal."

While the steel industry struggles to present a more unified front, its highly consolidated raw-material suppliers are using their clout.

The largest supplier, BHP Billiton, BHP.AU -0.85% Ltd., decided two years ago, amid strong opposition by steelmakers, to abandon long-term pricing for iron ore. It sells it instead at spot prices that tend to average higher over the long term. Other miners have followed BHP's lead.

Because of the change, steelmakers now earn a far smaller share of profit from making a ton of steel while mining companies earn a far greater share. For example, the percentage of the profits from one ton of steel that goes to steel companies for a ton of hot-rolled coil in Europe has dropped to 17% this year from 76% in 2006. For iron-ore miners, it has increased to 50% from 11%.

Without consolidation, big steel companies say they will have to rely on other methods to stay healthy. Those include developing better high-margin, high-tech, light-steel products for the auto sector, cutting costs and selling more in emerging markets.

U.S. Steel Chief Executive John Surma said recently his focus was on "things we can do inside the company."

[admin]

11:30 p.m. EST 11/27/12Treasurys
    Price Chg Yield %
2-Year Note   0/32 0.270
10-Year Note   1/32 1.637
* at close
11:20 p.m. EST 11/27/12Futures
  Last Change Settle
Crude Oil 87.18 0.01 87.18
Gold 1743.6 -1.2 1744.8
E-mini Dow 12854 -8 12862
E-mini S&P 500 1396.00 -1.50 1397.50
11:31 p.m. EST 11/27/12Currencies
  Last (mid) Prior Day †
Japanese Yen (USD/JPY) 81.87 82.16
Euro (EUR/USD) 1.2932 1.2944
† Late New York trading.

[admin]

Treasurys Price Chg Yield %
2-Year Note 0/32 0.262
10-Year Note 8/32 1.613
* at close

8:22 a.m. EST 11/28/12Futures Last Change Settle
Crude Oil 86.20 -0.98 87.18
Gold 1719.3 -25.5 1744.8
E-mini Dow 0 0 0
E-mini S&P 500 0.00 0.00 0.00

8:32 a.m. EST 11/28/12Currencies Last (mid) Prior Day †
Japanese Yen (USD/JPY) 81.84 82.16
Euro (EUR/USD) 1.2886 1.2944
† Late New York trading.

[admin]

Copper November 28,08:18
Bid/Ask 3.5085 - 3.5089
Change -0.0187 -0.53%
Low/High 3.5031 - 3.5328
Charts

Nickel November 28,08:19
Bid/Ask 7.6421 - 7.6453
Change +0.0325 +0.43%
Low/High 7.5792 - 7.7117
Charts

Aluminum November 28,08:18
Bid/Ask 0.8832 - 0.8834
Change -0.0036 -0.41%
Low/High 0.8802 - 0.8878
Charts

Zinc November 28,08:18
Bid/Ask 0.8862 - 0.8865
Change -0.0029 -0.32%
Low/High 0.8829 - 0.8927
Charts

Lead November 28,08:18
Bid/Ask 0.9885 - 0.9892
Change -0.0090 -0.90%
Low/High 0.9863 - 0.9983

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Europe, Middle East & Africa
Index Name Value Change % Change Time
EURO STOXX 50 Price EUR 2,528.28 -15.17 -0.60% 08:14:30
FTSE 100 Index 5,782.45 -17.26 -0.30% 08:13:10
CAC 40 Index 3,488.13 -14.00 -0.40% 08:14:00
Deutsche Borse AG German Stock Index DAX 7,305.05 -27.28 -0.37% 08:14:12
IBEX 35 Index 7,781.00 -82.70 -1.05% 08:14:07
FTSE MIB Index 15,335.94 -143.87 -0.93% 08:14:16
AEX-Index 332.45 -0.47 -0.14% 08:14:30
OMX Stockholm 30 Index 1,064.75 -6.69 -0.62% 08:13:21
Swiss Market Index 6,726.32 +14.61 +0.22% 08:14:05

More Europe, Middle East & Africa Indexes
Asia-Pacific
Index Name Value Change % Change Time
Nikkei 225 9,308.35 -114.95 -1.22% 01:28:01
Hong Kong Hang Seng Index 21,708.98 -135.05 -0.62% 03:01:30
S&P/ASX 200 4,447.31 -9.52 -0.21% 02:20:00