What's on Steel's mind? To answer that question, AMM went straight to the source and sat down with six top industry executives at the American Iron and Steel Institute's annual meeting in May for a roundtable discussion of hot-button topics, ranging from China and cap-and-trade to the fallout from the disintegration of Detroit's Big Three. Here's what they had to say.

What's been the toughest aspect of dealing with the current economic downturn? What criteria are you using when you decide to delay a project or idle a plant?

Daniel R. DiMicco, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Nucor Corp.: The toughest part for us and probably for everybody was the speed and depth with which things dropped off. We have all been through ups and downs in the business cycle. This one has shown itself to be very, very severe. It came out of left field and was like going off the edge of a cliff in terms of its size and the swiftness of the drop.

Louis Schorsch, executive vice president of Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal SA and president and chief executive officer of ArcelorMittal Flat Carbon Americas: I agree. I think we knew probably sometime in late October that we had better batten down the hatches and get ready for a very rough ride. On some level that recognition provoked a set of responses that we learned from previous downturns regarding what needs to be done. The toughest thing always is the impact of your decision-making on the people in the organization. We all deal with that a bit differently. We have about 18,000 employees in the United States. We have about 3,000 people on layoff now. We also have quite a large number of contractors, which means more people that are affected by it. I think the toughest thing is to make the decisions that determine to what degree you take steps that start to directly affect your employees beyond cutting overtime and reducing bonuses, which are automatic.

John P. Surma, chairman and chief executive officer of U.S. Steel Corp.: We're in what I call 40-percent Land now—40-percent capability utilization. None of our playbooks, none of our history, none of our thinking was in 40-percent Land. We have been in 60-percent Land. We know what that looks like, we know what to do and what levers to pull and how to pull them. But we were not experienced in 40-percent Land. The human cost of it, of course, is the most difficult to manage. It's the people on layoff, folks that work for us through other means—contractors, and so forth. And then there's the whole suite of things that the industry and the AISI are involved in around recruiting, developing relationships with universities and efforts on the diversity front. We have to cut back all that, knowing full well that it is probably the wrong thing for the long term. It's a really difficult thing to do, cutting back on training, cutting back on internships, all the things that we were working on.

Were you reactive enough? Did the industry react quickly enough?

James L. Wainscott, chairman of the AISI and chairman, president and chief executive officer of AK Steel Corp.: We knew things couldn't go on forever. I think what surprised us all was how quickly it ended. We knew there were parts of our business, the markets that we served, that were getting overheated. And sooner or later there was going to have to be a safety release. But it didn't go down; it just disappeared overnight. There were things we saw coming, but it hit us so much quicker and so much harder than I think anyone could have imagined.

DiMicco: We reacted to the market—each and every one of us reacted to the market. And the market said 'there's no more orders coming in.' So your backlog drops off rapidly. And it was not a question of having a chance to plan, to phase everything in. It just stopped, particularly after Lehman Brothers hit the skids and the credit markets seized up. Everything just stopped. One minute, everybody is gearing up for maybe a seasonal slowdown going on around the world. We had already been slow in the automotive business. We had already been slow in the residential housing business. That was going on for two years. What happened was the financial element—the crack in the financial institutions, the credit availability, turned this into an overnight event. One minute we're getting 150,000 tons of orders a week in bars, and the next minute we're getting 25,000 tons. So now you're working off backlogs, not working off orders. And at 93-percent capacity utilization, you can tell pretty quickly how soon you are not going to have anything to produce. So you immediately start cutting back. What did we do at Nucor? We came out immediately and said that all of our acquisition opportunities that we had just borrowed $1 billion for and went to the Street and executed a $2-billion equity deal are on hold. We were already in a housing and automotive recession. It was the financial crisis that shut everything off—everything. People were not sure they were going to have cash to run their businesses, so what did they do? They generated cash by running down their inventories. This hit everybody out of nowhere. And there is no way you could prepare for this, absolutely none.

Are there any signs of an upturn on the horizon? What are you monitoring closely as a reliable indicator or signal that the economy and steel demand are improving?

DiMicco: Long term, we are optimistic. Everything is long term here. We're still in uncharted territory. The industry is sitting at these levels not because we want to but because there is no business. What's causing the lack of business is the uncertainty out there with respect to the financial correction, the automotive collapse and the additional taxes on business and industry and higher energy costs that we have to look out for as a result of a proposed cap-and-trade policy. And right now, we have to assume the worst.

Schorsch: I think we all look at the service center numbers. And every month for the last little while, we've seen inventories substantially down and months-on-hand bouncing around...