Commodities Featured Article Iron ore price

Chinese steel mill sentiment falls

Tuesday, 8 October 2013

For those that don’t know, Mac Bank conducts a quite useful survey of sentiment in Chinese steel mills. Something of a steel PMI if you like. It has proved to be decent guide to price moves in iron ore and this month shows pretty decent falls, first in headline sentiment:

And in new orders:

Let’s not forget that some of this is seasonal around Golden Week and the coming winter. But destocking intentions are also up:

More evidence we’re moving into a period of price weakness.

About the author

David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.