Buying Anyway

By Dot Kessler. From MFGCalcs Magazine, Issue 1, November 2026, page 32.

In August, importers paid an estimated $3.9 billion in duties on steel coil, copper tube, insulated cable, pumps, valves and 31 other families of industrial goods. Two years earlier, the same goods had carried $828 million.

They bought more anyway. August’s imports of those goods came to about $27 billion, the most of any month in the U.S. International Trade Commission figures MFG Calcs keeps, which go back to January 2014. The figures show buyers paying. They cannot show why. The businesses cited in this story point to what they could not get at home: enough supply, the right specification, a short lead time, a price near the world’s.

In the first eight months of 2024, flat-rolled steel and insulated wire and cable carried estimated duties within a point of each other. In the same months of 2026, steel’s was about 46%, and its imports fell by more than half. Cable’s more than tripled, to about 12%, yet its imports rose 29%, and August was their biggest month in those figures.

One steel line barely flinched. Imports of steel bar, rod and wire, the family that holds wire rod, fell by less than a tenth, at a duty of about 36%. Steel mill prices at home had climbed too, 43% in the two years to September, Bureau of Labor Statistics data show. Insteel Industries, which makes steel wire reinforcing for concrete, gave its reason for buying abroad in its October results release, through its chief executive, H.O. Woltz III: “Domestic wire rod prices remain at historically high levels, well above prices in global markets, while availability continues to be constrained, thereby requiring the Company to supplement domestic purchases with offshore purchases and accept the working capital implication of elevated import volumes.”

For cable, the figures offer clues, not a motive. Its imports are counted in dollars, not tons. Copper cost about 44% more on world markets in the first seven months of 2026 than in the same months of 2024, International Monetary Fund data show, and the more cable’s price followed the metal, the less of its rise was more cable. About half the cable came from Mexico last year, at an average duty of 2.6%. The duty landed harder on copper mill products than on the cable. A dollar of copper rod, wire or tube now pays more than three and a half times the duty of a dollar of finished cable. Imports of copper rod, wire and tube fell by about a third.

At the low end of the duty scale, buying rose, and pumps and valves, like cable, had their biggest month in August. A shipping contact told the New York Fed, in its October Beige Book report, that import volumes were holding up because buyers of specialized machinery and components had no domestic alternatives. A Texas respondent in miscellaneous manufacturing told the Dallas Fed’s Texas Manufacturing Outlook Survey in September what buying at home had become: “We are now facing increased difficulty obtaining raw materials domestically. Items that were readily available now take long lead times or are not available in the same specifications we have historically purchased.”

Read it in the magazine

• MFGCalcs Magazine, Issue 1, November 2026, page 32