The EU’s industry chief says the bloc plans to raise tariffs on foreign steel in a bid to counter cheap Chinese imports. Nearly 100,000 jobs have been lost in the European steel sector in the past 15 years.
While expensive for the EU, tariffs on Chinese products are probably sensible.
There are a few actual sane reasons for imposing tariffs, and one of them is protecting critical industries that you can’t afford to lose because doing so would expose you to greater risks. Steel, due to its impact on downstream sectors, can reasonably be taken to be one of those. Look at the pain on relying on Russia for energy and how much weaker it made the response to their invasion of Ukraine. Losing critical industries to China makes it harder to exert pressure on China in the future, and easier for them to exert it on the EU.
They’re just following the same market trend thats been happening since before the 90’. You cant buy the steel from a mill cheaper than you buy the finished product from China. American manufacturing has been dead for half a century. Itll prolly happen in Europe too. So here’s your get rich EU scheme: start fuckin fabricating. You buy the manufactured parts from China because the quality is really hard to fuck up when it comes to machined steel parts that ship with MTRs. You take those parts and weld them into your finished product that you sell for 100x’s the actual cost to make.
All the more reason slapping tariffs on imported goods was and will go down in history as one of the fuckin dumbest economic decisions every made by any controlling power.
