Copper price down on Fed taper talk
Copper prices fell on Thursday as the prospect of the US Federal Reserve scaling back its pandemic stimulus pressured the metal used to gauge global economic health.
Copper for delivery in December fell 2.1% from Wednesday’s settlement price, touching $4.104 per pound ($9,028 per tonne).
The most-traded November copper contract on the Shanghai Futures Exchange dropped 0.9% to 68,030 yuan a tonne, and dipped 0.1% on a quarterly basis, on track for its first fall since the quarter ended March 2020.
A key focus of financial markets in the third quarter has been talks of policy tightening in the United States, which also boosted the dollar.
Copper prices will average more than $4 a pound this year, Diego Hernandez, head of Chilean mining society Sonami, in a recent Bloomberg interview.
“The supply-demand equation for copper is very tight, even amid market-wide uncertainties fueled by Chinese property turmoil and a global energy crunch,” said Hernandez, a former chief executive of Codelco and Antofagasta Plc.
“Supply and demand in the coming years should remain fairly tight so prices should be not extraordinary, but good — higher than long-term projections.”
Copper production in Chile, the world’s top copper producer, dropped 4.6% year-on-year in August amid falling ore grades and labor strikes at key deposits, government statistics agency INE said on Thursday.
The Andean nation’s copper output fell to 466,928 tonnes in August, the agency said. Chile’s production through August in 2021 has fallen 1.2% to 3.77 million tonnes.
