Hi, welcome to the Cato podcast.

My name is Clark Packard. I'm a research fellow in the Herbert A. Steafel Center for Trade Policy Studies here at the Cato Institute.

Hi, my name is Alfredo Carrillo Obregone. I am a research associate at the Steafel Center.

All right. We are here today to talk about the U.S. steel industry

and the sort of long history of protectionism that policymakers have granted to the steel industry.

You know, there was an impetus for why I decided to research and write about the U.S. steel industry, which is in late

2003, Nippon, Steel, a Japanese-based steel firm, attempted to purchase U.S. steel, a

Pennsylvania-based steel company, And somehow it became entangled in all this

political machinations back and forth. And it was, it became sort of a political hot potato.

And frankly, it angered me. And so I decided to, you know,

kind of dig in more deeply into the sort of history of U.S. steel protectionism. Basically,

what our paper will argue is that for nearly 60 years, the United States government has

showered all kinds of protectionism on the steel industry.

That protectionism has caused a number of problems. It's inflated steel costs for domestic manufacturers.

It's enriched cronies. And it's not done a whole lot to make the U.S. steel industry competitive globally.

I think it's fair to say that no industry, in fact, has received more

protectionism from the U.S. government than the steel industry. So with that, let's kind of dig in here.

Alfredo, could you give me just give listeners a quick snapshot of the current state of the domestic steel market today.

Yeah, absolutely, Clark. I think the first thing that the listeners should know is that when we talk

about the steel industry, we're basically talking of a relatively concentrated industry in which

there are basically five big players that together account for about 70% of the domestic market.

The companies that, the largest companies among those players are New Corps, Cleveland Cliffs,

...