Prices began rising again in the 1850s, peaking at £135/ton in London at the height of the Crimean War. The rest of this feature sketches out the most salient price movements in the past two centuries and discusses possible future trends. 1 illustrates, there have been many such booms and busts throughout history. Whilst unprecedented in terms of its sheer scale, the 2000s copper boom was certainly not a one-off event. The market recovered within two years and when JP Morgan purchased over half of the LME’s warehoused copper in early 2011, spot prices hit a record 458c/lb. After touching 400c/lb in 2006, prices gyrated wildly before plummeting during the global slowdown in 2008. Production struggled to keep up and inventories fell precipitously, triggering heavy speculative purchases. Millions of cell phones and PCs were sold in China, each containing ½oz and 1.5lbs of copper, respectively. 1500 new cars, each containing 50lbs of copper, were hitting China’s roads each day. The typical eight-storey building uses around 20 tons of copper wire and pipes and China built thousands of such blocks during the 2000s. Urbanisation, rural electrification and growing car and appliance ownership resulted in burgeoning consumption. What would possess a putatively sane person to cut through a 100,000V powerline? And to what extent was the 2000s boom unique?ĭuring the 2000s, the price of copper quadrupled, reflecting the extraordinary swell in demand by China. Their knavery led to delayed and cancelled train services and power outages affecting entire cities. Across the world, desperadoes were shinnying up pylons, breaking into substations and using quad bikes to rip up hundreds of metres of live copper cables from train tracks, seeking to make a killing down at the scrap yard but often killing themselves in the process.
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