Global slowdown, not tariffs

The largest American steelmaking company will reduce production at two facilities due to decreased demand, despite a year-old effort by the Trump administration to prop up domestic steelmakers with protective tariffs.
It's time to admit those tariffs have failed to achieve their primary policy aims.
U.S. Steel announced Tuesday that it would idle one blast furnace at its biggest facility in Gary, Indiana, and another at its plant in Ecorse, Michigan. In a statement, the company said the decision to shut down the two furnaces was because "market conditions have softened."
The Wall Street Journal reports that U.S. Steel, like other domestic steelmakers including Nucor and Steel Dynamics, has reported weaker-than-expected demand and reduced profit expectations in the second quarter of this year. Although President Trump provided a brief boost to the industry last year when he slapped 25 percent tariffs on foreign steel, that balloon appears to have popped.
Those tariffs "allowed domestic producers to raise prices, but falling demand for steel has blunted the benefit of the tariff in recent months," the Journal reported.

Import taxes are nothing more than what government does as a last ditch when government is broke.  The cause of the global slowdown? The US government is broke, invaded, it hosts the largest failed Hispanic state, it is deeply into debt, and we have three of the top five states nearing insolvency.

Trump tariffs are the last ditch attempt before our MMT moment.