Price increases in metals overseas, is China putting the fix on us?

It's as plain as day. If we piss off China just a little they can adjust a small little number in a completely unknown way and turn our country into a downward spiral of financial oblivion. Not only do we allow them to import the cute plastic dinosaurs and stuff that they design and make, but we somewhat rely on them to make most everything for half the businesses that are in the U.S. If you notice how the price of metals went up a years or so ago and shortly thereafter the economics, the debt ratios in all areas seem to really become a factor.

Did we sign some trade agreement about that time? Did we vocally align ourselves with Korea about that time? I am not sure as I write this, but let's say we did do something, maybe they are upset about our global police initiaves of late. A real easy, "untraceable", covert and effective retaliation would be to somehow put a duty on all metals imported into China when used for American export. There are a number of ways for a government to jump into the mix on these things. I am not making a conspiracy theory of any magnitude, I am just trying to decipher things by dreaming up a possible scenario. Man, if we piss them off royally I bet they could really put us in a pinch. I wonder if a good supply of CNC machines and textile mills could be considered a natural resource like, say... . . oil for instance... and the global economy should have an equal right to them because they are so plentiful. Sounds like grounds for police action.

I manage some video cards being purchased by our company and the price just went up about 6%... which is no big deal unless you sit in our position as a distributor and the margin is slim to begin with. We buy them from what was a Canadian company but got taken over about a year ago by a larger US corporation. About that time when I was still in the process of getting the first batch of emblems made I was told by my manufacturer in China that the price of metals was going up but that he would stick to the agreed upon price for my finished product out of aluminum. Trickling through the system a few months after I learned this from China, I was told by the video card vendor that in a few months from us speaking the price of the video cards would be going up due to higher manufacturing costs. A few other vendors mentioned the same things. In the last two months of that year most of those increases had caught up to my vendors and a handful of product lines have increased all the way to the end user.

Building a drift boat trailer from scratch here in the states requires a butt-pot of metal. We'll see how it plays out in the next month with the new "FDR" (Flatbed for Drifter and Raft?). Maybe I'll just call it a Franklin.