> There's no real shortage of steel around the world that I know of. We could just stockpile it instead, for example. And in the hypothetical tail-risk scenario this is all supposed to insure against... how do we even get the raw materials for making steel anyway?

The more I learn about steel, the more I realise it's not one single thing but a whole collection of different families of things, each with different tradeoffs.

e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-strength_low-alloy_steel#...