`Lakshmi Mittal steel mill acquisition strategy`

"Goes around buying up steel companies for a song" — the case that vindicates Tom's "steel isn't dead" thesis against Wall Street and Ned Thomas.

In the short run, I told you the story about the worldwide steel industry. Their productivity shot up from the 1960s into the 1990s by a factor of six or seven, and their employment went down. When you're eating 600 million tons of steel a year, you can't convince people to eat twice as much. So you end up with an oversupply. You get into these other externalities which have to do with competitiveness, which I don't know anything about, but I know it's important. All the gurus on Wall Street said the steel industry is dying. Well, who's dying, you idiots? It was a wonderful business. And this guy in India, [Lakshmi] Mittal, goes around buying up steel companies for a song, because everybody says oh, the industry's dead.