Procrastinating the prognosticating: 2013 metals industry survey

Dec 31, 2012 | 07:00 PM | AMM staff

If American business--and the metals sector especially--selected a word of the year, 2012’s winner would have been an easy choice: uncertainty.

At conferences and roundtables, at corporate meetings and in interviews, metal industry executives and analysts invoked uncertainty throughout the year, both as an explanation for why growth had been slow and as a sort of talisman to ward off undue optimism about intermittent economic upswings.Uncertainty also may be the word of the year in 2013, judging by the views put forward in AMM’s annual survey of metals sector executives. Consider: The re-election of President Obama will make the business climate more uncertain, but business still should be better off in 2013 than....