For mild steel finish just Parkerize.
Simple process I use all the time.
A couple of chemicals diluted in hot water, stainless tank.
Works best if the item is grit blasted first.
Brownells.com will set you up.

How deep do you want to go? I'm surprised it isn't worse than it is (yet). Were printing money like crazy driving down the value of the dollar, sending the bulk of that money to other economies, paying people more to stay home than they would get to work, therefore producing less so less to buy, while slowly bring people back out to play/spend.

The steel was overpriced to begin with. We reinvested in the steel industry but China buying up all the scrap drove demand. China undervalues the yuan at the expense of their own inflation to essentially receive a subsidy.

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi- ... story.html

https://globalfinanceschool.com/blog-po ... ndervalued

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/f ... dollar.asp

Demands in recent years by U.S. lawmakers to revalue the yuan have grown in direct proportion to the nation’s burgeoning trade deficit with China, which soared from $10 billion in 1990 to $315 billion in 2012. Critics of China’s currency policy claim that the undervalued yuan exacerbates global imbalances and costs jobs. According to a study by the Economic Policy Institute in 2011, the U.S. lost 2.7 million jobs - mainly in the manufacturing sector - between 2001(when China entered the WTO) and 2011, resulting in $37 billion in annual wage losses because these displaced skilled workers had to settle for jobs that paid much less.