Copper: Is the Green Metal in a Supercyle?
Episode One - Trump's historical rug pull on New York copper prices
The Basics: Hare meets Hedgehog
The dominant narrative today is simple: as the world races to electrify everything, the global economy—the hare—needs far more copper than the mining industry—the hedgehog—can deliver in time. Unlike energy, copper isn’t consumed; it’s used and reused, which makes timely supply even more critical. I’ve called this the industry challenge and wrote and tweeted extensively about it between 2019 and 2021.
In an industry conference in 2021, Ivan Glasenberg, the then Chief Executive of Glencore, described it like this: “The price of copper needs to rise 50 per cent to encourage enough new supply to meet projected demand from the global green revolution”. And he continued to say “we need another two Glencores . That’s the scale we’re talking about. I don’t know how we’ll find that much copper to fill that gap.”