2 weeks Ago By Frik Els
December copper received a nice bump on Tuesday, rising around 1% to $4.41 per pound ($9,730 per tonne) in early morning Chicago trading. At the end of September copper comfortably scaled $10,000 a tonne after Beijing announced a raft of mostly monetary measures to stimulate the country’s slowing economy and in particular its besieged property sector.
The rather hopefully named Beijing “bazooka” was expected to be followed up by another stimulus blitz the following week, this time focused more on fiscal policy and infrastructure investment, but the latter turned out to be a damp squib, with prices down 8% since then. Next week could be another make or break moment for the copper price in a highly anticipated meeting of the Standing Committee of China’s National People’s Congress, the country’s highest lawmaking body, scheduled for 4–8 November. Copper markets will be hoping for more detail of the scale and nature of Beijing’s stimulus measures, but in a note the copper service of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence points out that the announcement did not mention debt or fiscal policy on the agenda, so it remains to be seen how forthcoming policymakers are with details: “If the meeting fails to shine further light on the scale of fiscal stimulus, we expect copper prices to come under renewed pressure.
We note that copper prices have trended significantly above their implied relationship with the USD index since the announcement of China’s stimulus ‘blitz’ in late September. “If Chinese authorities follow through on the market’s expectations, we could see a permanent step-change in this relationship (just like we did post-COVID). Conversely, if the market loses faith in China’s stimulus efforts and deems them inadequate or superficial, our regression analysis suggests that copper stands to drop by close to $1,000 per tonne.
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