Beyonce’s baby gets new cradle

Before you think we’ve gone all Heat magazine take a look at the photo here. Unless you have been tuning into Lorraine Kelly of a morning or Loose Women, you may or may not know that singing sensation and serial arse wobbler Beyonce has  gone and bought a wrought iron cradle for her sprog.

No doubt the celebrity magazines and red tops will be all over this and you can bet every wannabee footballers wife and Katie price impersonator will be after one for their little princes and princesses.

The victorian appearance makes it fairly simple to resemble using off the shelf components and I expect not beyond the skills of most fabricators. Something to think about for those quiet days in the workshop maybe, especially for you bed makers out there.

Chinese to become less reliant on steel imports

One of the objectives of this blog is to keep and eye on the current trends in commodity prices that are likely to affect readers.  The current climate makes it more and more difficult to pass the cost of raw materials on to end users and it is very likely as has been happening  in a lot of cases that people take the hit and the profits become smaller while overheads get higher. Of course all this does is increase the possibility of cashflow problems later down the line. It can often seem like a mystery to most of us when our  stockholders inform us of price increases. Either it’s too much demand hiking the prices up or too little demand hiking the prices up and anyway it’s all down to the Chinese, its no wonder with such logic that the conspiracy theorists have been hard at work.

Recently however things do seem to have levelled out a little and hopefully this is just the beginning of a new age of stability. According to Zhu Jimin chairman of the China Iron and Steel Association the development of China’s domestic iron ore mines had been speeded up and was now growing at an annual rate of about 20%, gradually reducing China’s dependence on overseas imports. A little cohesion for the longer term would go a great way to easing the headaches of the small business person, here’s hoping.