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After a difficult 2019, there were some glimmers of hope on the trade front for nonferrous scrap market participants early in 2020 with the passage of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the “phase one” U.S.-China trade deal, and China’s announcement to reclassify certain scrap grades from “waste” to raw materials. But as we’ve seen with...

In London, LME 3-mo. copper and aluminum futures traded as low as $5,638/mt and $1,697.50/mt, respectively, before retracing some of those losses. Fastmarkets reports that LME 3-mo. lead prices “closed at its lowest level since May 2019 on Monday February 10, dipping below the key $1,800-per-tonne support level, while nickel futures struggled to breach resistance...

The consensus forecast is that U.S. industrial production declined 0.3% in January following a 0.3% drop in December, while the capacity utilization rate is expected to have dipped to 76.8% in January from 77.0% in December. We’ll also get Fed Chair Jay Powell’s reports before Congress along with a number of speeches from Federal Reserve...

According to Briefing.com, the key takeaway from the report is that “…employment conditions remain in that sweet spot of being encouraging on the hiring front and encouraging on the inflation front in that average hourly earnings growth isn’t accelerating sharply enough to provoke imminent rate-hike concerns.” Unemployment The annual average unemployment rate for 2019 came...

In dollar terms, total U.S. scrap exports were similarly down 5% year-on-year to $19.2 billion in 2019, but the composition of the top export markets changed in several significant ways. For the first time since the year 2000, China was no longer the top export destination for U.S. scrap in dollar terms, having been replaced...