It's been a big shock to the market, this massive flood into the... by Stephen Briggs

It's been a big shock to the market, this massive flood into the LME warehouses.

Stephen Briggs

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Categorized in : Energy

And it’d be very hard to make up something as strange as the Dutch tulipmania in the seventeenth century, for example. Or the mysterious case of Thomas Clapper. Or the entire civic history of Seattle, Washington.

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It’s a concern for us. by Stephen Briggs

It’s a concern for us.

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I can't confirm it (Glencore selling metal stocks) ... but it is much easier to liquidate LME (refined) metals than concentrates.

This is one metal I'm feeling distinctly uncomfortable about. You have to conclude that demand is very weak, yes, you've had a surge of production out of Myanmar in the past couple of years, but shipments out of Indonesia, the dominant supplier, have been very low.

Copper is trying to look for a bottom, but there are plenty of things that can go wrong, revolving around Ukraine and Greece in particular, and in the background the concern about the extent of the slowdown going on in China.

That (80,000 tonnes) is approximately how much you're going to lose and that's substantial in the lead market, it's a very special type of lead concentrate so it's not that easy to replace with other stuff. That's why the lead price is substantially outperforming the other metals.