After announcing “work adjustments” and the idling of three pellet furnaces yesterday, Cliffs Natural Resources is now announcing record profits. It’d be easy to say this is just another example of corporate greed, but to be fair this is just evidence that we’re coming off of a classic “high” in the global steel market and are now heading into what could be the inevitable “low.” The hope is that that the low is short and doesn’t lead to meaningful mine closures on the Range, but an extended recession would be very damaging to the Range economy.
This is all you need to know about the Iron Range economy: bad times hit us last and hardest. Some of the early years of the Great Depression were booming up here, but then more than half the able bodied workers in the area were out of work for years during the 1930s. If it weren’t for the CCC and other New Deal programs several families literally would have starved.
The good news about all this is that no one up here “worries” so much as they “brace” for the potential recession of 2009.
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