A recent article by Bloomberg has flagged a problem with the copper market. It comes from a storage facility in Shanghai’s free trade zone where the Yangtze River meets the Pacific. These warehouses contained copper stockpiles and boomed on a financing scheme that allowed finance to be raised against physical copper. The problem is that these warehouses are now nearly empty. According to Bloomberg, stock levels are down around 300K tonnes from earlier this year to some of the lowest levels in decades. The near-term outlook for copper is tilted to the downside of slowing global growth, but the physical market is very ... (full story)