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U.S. Steel Shareholders Approve Sale to Japan's Nippon Steel
- shortsunblack 2y agoIt's ironic. In 90s U.S. purposefully sabotaged Japanese chip industry with tariffs and other coercive measures. Today, a Japanese company buys out a poster-child of American industrial capacity.
- nothercastle 2y agoUS steel was a poster child of government capture
- advisedwang 2y agoCrazy that congress is fighting over ownership of TikTok, but letting a critical piece of US manufacturing be foreign owned with hardly a word.
- sanxiyn 2y agoI think the critical difference is that Japan is an ally and China is not.
- Loughla 2y agoFor now? I am pretty sure that at one point China was an ally and Japan an enemy. I think.
- impulser_ 2y agoYeah but times are very different than the past. Today, Japan is one of our greatest allies in the region and their economy depends heavily on the US. The US is Japan's #1 trade partner and a lot of their industries are heavily involved in the US. For them to become an enemy of the of the US would probably kill their economy.
- frumper 2y agoThe US is China's #1 trade partner...
- tw04 2y agoAnd I’m pretty sure if Japan became adversarial, there would be a breakup triggered on national security concerns.
- comex 2y agoFor the last 80 years. Things will probably change someday, but not anytime soon.
- woooooo 2y agoIn the 80s and 90s there was a lot of hostility to Japan, because they looked like they might surpass us economically. They were even the villain of some Tom Clancy books. Now, the fear/hate is aimed at China, same reason.
- jszymborski 2y agoThere's more reason than that for Western hostility to China, not least of which is that it is an authoritarian regime with aggressive expansionist goals. Let's also not forget the reciprocity of the hostilities.
- pfannkuchen 2y ago> aggressive expansionist goals Like reintegrating Taiwan and HK? Anything else? Tibet I guess? I thought China was generally satisfied with its borders, except for areas it feels were split off due to external interference.
- jszymborski 2y agoI mean, I feel like "generally satsified but for a couple of sovreign states" is handwaving things a bit. Russia similarly feels Ukraine was split off due to "external interference". Makes the claim no more legitimate. But also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_imperialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_imperialism
- przemub 2y agoSo just give or take 35 million people, with Taiwan being integral to the world's chip manufacturing industry, and HK conquest violating the handover treaty. That's far from nothing.
- jjk166 2y agoThere's a lot of areas that it feels were split off due to external influence. Arguably nearly the whole of east Asia has at some point or another been under some form of Chinese control. They are making extensive claims on the south china sea into waters contested with Vietnam and the Philippines. There are several small islands between Taiwan and Japan which are China claims (and more importantly the oil beneath them). There are a number of territorial disputes with India and Bhutan over control of parts of the Tibetan Plateau which are critical to the water supplies of nearly the whole of Asia. Additionally several border disputes previously settled between China and it's neighbors, such as Russia and the states of Central Asia, are likely to be reconsidered as Russian influence in the region diminishes. China has also been proactively setting up claims to various exclaves around the world, primarily in the Indian Ocean and Africa. They've set up various "debt traps" where they lend money to build infrastructure like ports to nations that have no serious chance at repaying the loans, and should they default then China receives control. Additionally China is pursuing traditional overseas military bases in Burma, Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, Pakistan, Seychelles, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Tanzania, and the UAE, in addition to bases it already has in Djibouti and Cambodia. Such bases are not in and of themselves expansionist, and probably are more about keeping vital trade links open, but increased ability to project power would be a pre-requisite for any expansionist goals in those regions.
- bozhark 2y agoChina has never been a western ally
- dudeinjapan 2y agoPerhaps you are forgetting WWII, when China was a main member of a group which literally called themselves "The Allies" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Policemen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Policemen
- jsiepkes 2y agoCalling yourself "the allies" doesn't make you long term allies. It was just a group with a common enemy for short a time. Take Stalin, also part of "the Allies", he had invaded Poland together with Hitler and also invaded Finland. Couple of years later he was fighting Hitler because he got stabbed in the back by Hitler. And after WWII the west got into the coldwar with Stalin.
- hnfong 2y ago> Calling yourself "the allies" doesn't make you long term allies. The original claim was literally "China has never been a western ally". GP pointed out a counter example during WWII. Your response seems to be against a strawman argument...
- dudeinjapan 2y agoHad the Nationalists in China prevailed against Mao they would have likely remained a Western ally. Certainly their descendants in Taiwan are today. But who knows?
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y agoVery apt example on Stalin, exactly right.
- woodruffw 2y agoChina was very notably an ally while the KMT was in power of mainland China.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoJapan is littered in American military bases and personnel. It is practically a territory with a fig leaf of domestic policy self determination.
- hx8 2y agoExcept the yen is the third most traded currency globally and Japan has the 4th largest economy in the world. It's true that their military strategic position is heavily dependent on the alliance with the US, but they performed exceptionally well with their 'fig leaf' of 'self determination.'
- kjkjadksj 2y agoAnd that was done with an unparalleled level of american investment to build such a trade partner. Billions of dollars spent by the american government alone in aid that largely came in the form of grants, not loans. Billions more in investment by american banks and funds through the years. Majority shareholder in toyota today is a private bank out of Plano, TX.
- blackhawkC17 2y ago> Majority shareholder in toyota today is a private bank out of Plano, TX. Correction - Fisher Investment is the largest individual shareholder, with just a 0.05% stake. Stating "majority" would mean they own >50%. https://www.wallstreetzen.com/stocks/us/nyse/tm/ownership#:~:text=Toyota%20Motor%20Stock%20Ownership%20FAQ&text=Toyota%20Motor%20(NYSE%3A%20TM),representing%200.05%25%20of%20the%20company https://www.wallstreetzen.com/stocks/us/nyse/tm/ownership#:~....
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y agoThe difference is that Japan is a Western country, China isn't.
- ludston 2y agoWhat? You mean capitalist nation rather than communist right?
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y agoNo, I mean with rule of law and powerful institutions. As opposited to China (or Russia), which have law, but institutions are engineered so that the person in power can highjack them to ensure the outcomes they want. Think about it. In western countries (US, UK, EU, Japan, etc) you can have a court rule something that is seriously inconvenient for the government. In China and Russia that never happens.
- throwaway2037 2y agoOverall, I agree with your sentiment. The specific example that you chose was very thoughtful. If parliament is forced to accept a court decision, it says a lot about the maturity of a democracy. However, I take issue with the term "Western". In this case, I would say the most advanced countries in OECD, which implies: highly functioning democracy and highly industrialised, capitalist economy. To be clear, for historical reasons there are some, err, odd members in OECD, including Turkey (currently a dysfunctional democracy) and Mexico (high levels of perceived corruption, drug war, poor control of police). And, to be fair, I don't have a good way to decide which are "the most advanced countires in OECD".
- azinman2 2y agoHaving an adversary control the psychological inputs to half of your population (including a majority of the youth) is clearly a bad idea. I actually commend congress for taking this action, no matter the rhetoric. US steel is a separate issue that also probably shouldn’t be sold, but at least with Japan there’s some reciprocity in access to markets.
- Razengan 2y ago[flagged]
- crisply5706 2y agoNo, it's not. Nobody said that. Stop screaming nonsense so that someone will argue with you.
- Razengan 2y agoSo why aren’t you all screaming about those as much as you scream about TikTok
- crisply5706 2y agoNormal adults can care about more than one thing at a time and it is not mandatory or necessary to talk about every problem every time. Why aren't you screaming about the various genocides and wars? Why aren't you screaming about every single injustice in the world all the time?
- loufe 2y agoI'm surprised this is confusing. While one could talk in terms of what is just and right according to law and rules, but this is without a doubt a political deciison. It's a question of US-opposed vs US-aligned country company ownership.
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y agoIt's only confusing to the "they're all equally bad, you can't know anything for sure" kind of people. Anyone who spend 10 minutes thinking about the subject isn't confused.
- mtcprodus 2y agoThere's obviously a difference between Japan, a US ally, ownership and China, a US enemy, ownership. Chinese 50 cents army hard at work here.
- MattGaiser 2y ago“Foreign” comprises both friends and foes. That is more the key issue. If TikTok were from the UK, there would be no hearings in Congress.
- delfinom 2y agoThey didn't care an actual us adversary bought a major pork producer in the US.... Japan is at least an allied country, and they wouldn't be buying a failing company to just throw it away. The company that mainly opposed it, Cleveland cliffs wants to buy the remains to have a complete monopoly on automotive metal supply.
- gimmeThaBeet 2y agoYeah, that part kind of grinds my gears a little bit. Aside from the politics getting involved, the biggest agitator is the rival bidder. But part of their revised bid before Nippon included a breakup fee in case their bid got blocked on anti-trust grounds. Which, on the one hand, while I will say I probably disagree with a lot of anti-trust policy enforcement currently, the implicit notion that the rival American acquisition is better is imo kinda laughable. The things CC is mainly interested in are like entirely horizontal, ore production/pelletizing, and automotive steel. Cliffs has already bought AK and Arcelor's US mills in the past 5 years, the fact that they would be allowed to consolidate the midwest further is like, what do you actually believe in?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bsder 2y agoYou can "solve" Japan owning US Steel by the army showing up tomorrow. You can't move a steel mill. You can't "solve" TikTok short of shutting them down.
- fragmede 2y agoRequire Department of Homeland Security agents be given access to systems at TikTok to monitor and modify the algorithm to their liking instead of just shutting the whole thing down.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bsder 2y agoFirst, you would have a very determined adversary versus the very best of Homeland Security aka completely incompetent fools (in reality it would be outsourced to the very best lowest bidder). Second, what are you gonna do when you find a violation, fine them? If you can even prove it, we know how well that works. Third, no matter how you bend the algorithm, I can make it bend further to do what I want. Finally, China will just keep swallowing whatever penalty in order to keep feeding propaganda. All you are doing is postponing the inevitable shutdown. You might as well get it over with now.
- fragmede 2y agothat's utterly defeatist. if I pointed out that you're not going to live forever, so why not get it over with now, I'd be a total asshole. I see you're in the "government is always incompetent" camp. If, instead, we treat it as fallible; imperfect but not always incompetent, there's a reasonable job that can be done. (yes, even by the government.) ideally there would be more creative penalties than mere fines, and in this fantasy world of mine, there would be proper, non-monetary incentives for compliance. ultimately, full divestment of CCP influence on TikTok is the goal. If Mark Zuckerberg owned TikTok we'd be back to regular hating on social media, instead of this extra geopolitical version.
- bradleyjg 2y agoThe factories aren’t going anywhere. If Japan and the U.S. go to war, we can nationalize them.
- benced 2y agoCan you explain what nefarious things Japan - one of the US’s closest allies by the way - could do by owning 12% of the USA’s steel output in the form of physical factories that are on US soil?
- hbossy 2y agoIt's also the only country to ever start a war with the US over steel exports.
- brg 2y agoReport to other governments the allocation and distribution of government steel purchasing, and thereby provide estimates for the production and maintenance of warships, subs, tanks, and other vehicles.
- jjk166 2y agoThe number of ships the US builds and other general quantities of war materiel is public knowledge. Beyond government accountability, US policy is designed around deterrence, where you want your potential adversaries to see just how big a stick you're carrying so as to prevent them attacking you in the first place. With modern satellites, it would be impossible to hide any large scale production even if we tried to keep it secret. The US certainly does have some classified military procurement, but these items are too small to have any critical details revealed by a crude analysis of steel consumption.
- mrguyorama 2y agoYou realize we freely publish a lot of that right? The US has a gigantic military, and showing that off is an important form of deterrence. Like, most of those tanks are just sitting out in the desert, in full view of global satellites. YOU can collect that information for like a thousand bucks, by buying satellite imagery. People are doing that right now.
- Razengan 2y ago[flagged]
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- anonymousab 2y agoBiden talked about it last month and there have been a couple of small grumblings in Congress since: https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/us-senator-urges-biden-review-alleged-nippon-steel-ties-china-2024-04-02/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/us-senator-urges...
- fragmede 2y agoyou don't want to know how much of America the Saudis own.
- jandrewrogers 2y agoIt is no different than the US Congress granting ASML, a Netherlands company, a license to produce EUV lithography technology. Japan and the Netherlands are closely integrated geopolitically with the US for all practical purposes. China, by contrast, is aggressively adversarial in its geopolitical ambitions. The difference really couldn't be more stark.
- selimthegrim 2y agoDidn’t they shut down Nikon’s EUV program and give the IP to ASML?
- throwaway2037 2y agoWho is "they"? I Google'd for "Nikon’s EUV program". First hit: https://www.nikon.com/company/ir/ir_library/event/pdf/2023/23_irday_all_e_1.pdf https://www.nikon.com/company/ir/ir_library/event/pdf/2023/2... Page 47: > Nikon exited the development of EUV lithography systems about 10 years ago due to the enormous investments required for the development. I could not find anything about "giv[ing] IP to ASML". Can you provide a reliable source?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- selimthegrim 2y agoThere were some allegations elsewhere on HN that the US government had a hand in this.
- D13Fd 2y ago> a critical piece of US manufacturing You're wrong there. The U.S. Steel Corp. has a long history but hasn't been a the leader even in the U.S. for some time now. We are talking about a couple of very outdated steel plants coupled with some very outdated infrastructure, basically.
- echelon 2y agoWhere are the subsidies for US Steel? This seems like a critical input for national defense and industry. Even though the Japanese are allies, we should always have a domestic iron in the fire.
- sanxiyn 2y agoNucor exists. US Steel is not #1, even in US.
- pfdietz 2y agoI remember when Nucor was the scrappy small competitor. It's quite a story, that company.
- MattGaiser 2y agoUS Steel isn’t even the biggest steel producer in the USA. That would be Nucor.
- jessriedel 2y agoStrongly recommended blog post: ‘“No inventions; no innovations," a History of US Steel’ by Brian Potter https://www.construction-physics.com/p/no-inventions-no-innovations-a-history https://www.construction-physics.com/p/no-inventions-no-inno...
- macintux 2y ago> Today, it makes just 12% of American steel...and employs around the same number of people as online pet retailer Chewy. That's...surprising.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y agoAutomation makes a difference!
- sosull 2y ago+1. I read this a few weeks back and it really stuck with me.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoThanks for sharing. This is a disturbing read in some ways: > To maintain prices in the face of fluctuating demand, Gary would gather the industry’s leadership together in regular “Gary Dinners,” where price levels would be agreed upon and Gary would “exhort the chairmen, presidents, or other major owners of steel companies to maintain rank.” Those who refused to cooperate would be “disciplined” by the others. Many former Carnegie Steel executives, schooled in the intense competition of the Carnegie years, were allergic to this strategy, and departed for other steel companies. > Under his leadership, the company successfully fought off a Justice Department lawsuit to break up the company as an illegal monopoly. (Perversely, the court ruled that the Gary Dinners proved that US Steel did not have the power to set prices, and thus couldn’t be a monopoly). This makes me wonder if we just need totally different laws that are not going to be mired in lawsuits that drag out for years while monopolies and oligopolies continue making money. Maybe we just need higher taxes for the biggest corporations.
- lifeisstillgood 2y agoOne of the driving forces in steel making is high capital cost which drives the need to keep operating at full capacity, driving prices to margin. There are not many industries like that anymore - steel still is, oil, and some industrial chemicals. But even Pharma has slightly different cost structures. The big remining one is chip making - I wonder if “data centres” counts too?
- cowpig 2y agoOil and gas refining, paper and pulp industry, food processing (e.g. grain milling), textile production, plastic manufacturing, mining, ... basically everything that's a commodity?
- renewiltord 2y agoITT Software Engineers who think that US Steel is the only US steel manufacturer because of the name. Nucor is bigger and better. You guys always want to prop up failing companies when we have better alternatives right here. Christ, we'd have an annual bailout for IBM's laptops to keep them from selling to Lenovo. I can just imagine: "All tech companies must buy Thinkpads. The government will give $20b to IBM to continue laptops" to the thunderous sound of HN cheering. Bunch of closet communists here.
- Tsarbomb 2y agoThe government giving money to corporations without ownership is communism now? I think you may be thinking about nationalism and some other things adjacent to that...
- MattGaiser 2y agoA lot of it is simply that people don’t update their knowledge from when they initially learned it. I still have relatives claiming that poor countries such as the Philippines, Thailand, and Egypt, and India are having 6+ kids per family.
- avar 2y agoWell, your relatives are probably right depending on how a "family" is defined. Are we talking about children per household, do multi-generational families count? Then they're definitely more right than not. Or are you all fumbling your way towards discussing the "birth rate", which is how it's usually discussed. That may or may not be the same as "kids per family".
- MattGaiser 2y agoNo, it is all about the birthrate. Those countries are poor as "they are having more children than they can feed, yet alone afford to educate."
- shiroiushi 2y agoA lot of the people here are almost old enough to remember WWII...
- mise_en_place 2y agoLooks like a great deal for shareholders, but not so much for the workers. There is an interesting dynamic at work here.