Government Shutdown Impact on Steel Market Update

Effect of the government shutdown on information flow: about half of the data that we at SMU use to evaluate the state of and direction of the steel market is produced by government agencies and is publicly available. The current nature of things was brought home to us on Tuesday when we attempted to access the Department of Commerce Manufacturing, Mining and Construction statistics homepage and found the following message; “Due to the lapse in government funding, census.gov sites, services, and all online survey collection requests will be unavailable until further notice. Updates regarding government operating status and resumption of normal operations can be found at .”