Supply Chain Research

President-elect Biden has inherited a wide range of tariff programs from the Trump administration. Among the most controversial are the section 232 (“national security”) tariffs applied to imports of steel and aluminum since 2018. Those tariffs were designed to ensure capacity utilization in steel reached 80%, a level not achieved since Q4’18. More recently the ratio has fallen to 61.6% in Q3’20, down from 76.5% in Q4’19. The peak in utilization and subsequent decline has tracked a similar move in imports of steel and aluminum, suggesting that factors such as the economy and downstream s...