TRUMPENOMICS
Copper price sets fresh record as US tariff threat wipes out global surplus
Copper hit a record in New York and closed in on all-time highs in London on Tuesday, as the threat of US import tariffs keeps pulling metal into American warehouses and turns what was supposed to be a comfortable global surplus into scarcity everywhere else.
Comex copper for September delivery rose as much as 1.8% to $6.7270 a pound (about $14,830 a tonne), topping the previous record of $6.7140 set on August 12. The contract was last up 1.6% at $6.7125, some $550 a tonne above the London price, a premium of close to 4%.
On the LME, the three-month contract added 0.4% to $14,251 a tonne after finishing Monday at $14,201, its highest ever close, and traded as high as $14,343 during the session, within 1.3% of January’s all-time peak of $14,527.50.
Copper had touched $14,396 a tonne on August 17, its highest since late January, BMI noted on Friday, before a rush of returning metal knocked it back towards $14,000. Stocks on warrant in LME warehouses jumped 74.5% in a week, including the largest daily inflow since 2024, and the cash premium over three-month metal collapsed to $248 from the five-year high of $434 reached during this month’s squeeze.
The reprieve barely lasted a week. Orders to withdraw 51,400 tonnes hit the warehouse system on Monday, part of some 65,400 tonnes earmarked for departure in recent days, as metal resumed its march across the Atlantic to Comex, where inventories have risen for 46 straight days to a record 675,185 tonnes.
‘A deficit market in reality’
The US imported 885,000 tonnes of refined copper in the first half, up 3% from a year earlier and on pace to approach 2025’s record 1.64 million tonnes, as traders position for another round of tariff roulette: duties on refined copper of 15% from January 2027, stepping up to 30% from 2028, remain on the table in Washington.
CRU projected a 639,000-tonne global surplus for 2026 but now regards the market as at best balanced. “If imports keep coming in as they have been, then it’s going to look like a deficit market in reality,” principal copper analyst Robert Edwards told Reuters.
“Based on our numbers, you’re looking at years for that metal to get consumed,” Macquarie strategist Alice Fox said of the record Comex stockpile. Bank of China International’s Amelia Fu expects “new record highs in copper prices in coming weeks or months”, though Glencore chief executive Gary Nagle has argued a tariff announcement, whichever way it falls, would take the heat out of prices simply by ending the uncertainty.
Wall Street chases Southern Copper
Southern Copper has turned the squeeze into a scorching week. The Grupo Mexico unit, which is mapping a route to more than 1 million tonnes of annual output by 2029, has surged 15% over the past five sessions, touching a record $220.78 after a 6.3% jump on Friday.
Wall Street is struggling to keep up, with the consensus price target near $166, more than 20% below the market, and CICC, the Beijing-based state-backed investment bank, cutting the stock to market perform on valuation late last week even after record second-quarter sales of $4.3 billion and a dividend hike.
The rally has redrawn the top of the mining league table: at about $183 billion, Southern Copper is now worth more than Rio Tinto, at just under $180 billion, and trails only BHP’s $246 billion, despite Rio generating nearly four times the revenue and more than twice the profit over the past year. In MINING.COM’s TOP 50 ranking, where the stock stands in for parent Grupo Mexico, that would mark the copper producer’s first appearance at no. 2.
Freeport has fared even better over the week, adding almost 19% to trade within cents of its own all-time high, while First Quantum, Ivanhoe Mines and Teck Resources are all up about 11%.
Zijin Mining is the laggard, falling 2.5% in New York on Tuesday after the Chinese group warned that its 1.2 million tonne mined copper target is under pressure, with flooding at the Kamoa-Kakula mine in Congo expected to cut its attributable output by up to 57,000 tonnes this year.
Ivanhoe Electric added just 1% on Monday despite the US Export-Import Bank lifting its potential loan for the Santa Cruz copper project in Arizona by a third to $1.1 billion, and South32 gained little on a 61% boost to the reserve estimate at Sierra Gorda in Chile.
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