This Measure of Copper Is Another Bad Omen for the Commodities Meltdown

[marmar]

(Bloomberg) The number of requests to withdraw copper from London Metal Exchange warehouses relative to the level of global inventories tracked by the bourse dropped this week to the lowest since March 2013. That shows consumption has almost dried up for the stockpiles that have doubled over the past year.

Slower economic growth in China, the world’s biggest metals user, helps to explain the drop in demand. For commodity investors, it’s a bad omen because copper has historically been used as an indicator for what’s to come in raw materials and as a gauge of global expansion.

“Copper is ubiquitous in its uses across industry,” Nic Brown, the head of commodity research at Natixis SA in London, said in a telephone interview. “Concerns about copper prices and Chinese demand for copper, that’s a good reason to be worried more generally about demand for industrial metals and a wide variety of other commodities as well.”

Copper futures for August delivery declined 1.7 percent to $2.433 a pound at 11 a.m. on the Comex in New York, heading for the biggest loss in two weeks. .................(more)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-22/this-measure-of-copper-is-another-bad-omen-for-the-commodities-meltdown

[Warpy]

1. The building boom in China, which has driven prices for a decade, is about to come

to a screeching halt since so much has been sitting empty. There have been whole "new towns" with near zero occupancy because the jobs around them failed to materialize them. Just like in the 80s before the S&L bust here, building is being done for the sake of building, actually getting people to occupy the building is not the aim.

I don't know whether they're headed for a total bust or if all that new building will eventually be bulldozed to return the land to agricultural production. I just know that demand is going to be low there for the foreseeable future.

That means lower copper prices and that mans the local thieves and vandals are going to have to go back to lifting catalytic converters from parked cars for the platinum instead of stripping the wiring and plumbing out of houses on the market.

[House of Roberts]

2. I don't know about copper,

but the price for aluminum cans at the scrap yard is at a low I haven't seen in years. Normally in the $0.65 to $0.75 range, it's down to $0.45 last time I went, a few weeks ago.