Remember those tariffs and the panic over the rising price of Canadian lumber? You can forget it now. Lumber has, in a word, collapsed. The Wall Street Journal (subscription) reports:
Since hitting $639 per 1,000 board feet on May 17, futures lost nearly half their value. Lumber ended at $332.50 on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on Monday, down 26% on the year.
Tariffs were placed on imports from Canada in late 2017, raising the price of much of the softwood that is used to build U.S. homes. Wildfires and wood-boring beetles in British Columbia crimped wood supplies, while deliveries were delayed by rail bottlenecks and shortages of truck drivers just as U.S. home construction seemed to be taking off.
At the time, home builders said the unprecedented rise in lumber prices was adding thousands of dollars to the cost of new homes. Shares of big timber concerns Weyerhaeuser Co. and PotlatchDeltic Corp. hit all-time highs.
Then the wheels began to fall off the rally. Wood ordered in a panic early in the year began arriving by summer, filling lumber yards just as the housing market started to cool. A pair of devastating hurricanes slowed construction activity in swaths of the Southeast while the wettest autumn on record in Texas stymied builders there.
