Copper hit an all-time high on the London Metal Exchange for the second session running. The three-month contract touched $14,617 a tonne on Tuesday and was quoted at $14,581, up about 0.5%, at 11:08 am Singapore time — a day after Monday's $14,533 peak took out January's $14,527.50 record. That's roughly +17% so far in 2026 and about +47% over 12 months.

This isn't a demand boom. It's a tariff vacuum.

The US Commerce Department was required to hand in its review of tariffs on refined copper imports by June 30. More than two months later, no decision has been published. So traders keep shovelling metal into America to get ahead of a duty that may or may not arrive — and the stockpile numbers are ridiculous. US exchange warehouses now hold about 695,624 tonnes of copper, against roughly 80,000 tonnes in February 2025. That's more than eight times as much metal sitting in one country, and every tonne parked there is a tonne that isn't available anywhere else. LME sheds are being drained by those US-bound flows, and Shanghai inventories are at their lowest since 2024.

Mine supply isn't filling the hole. Global mined copper output fell 1.1% in the first half of 2026 versus a year earlier, with concentrate production down 2.6%. Chile's copper exports dropped to $4.63 billion in August from $5.37 billion in July. Jia Zheng of Suzhou Chuangyuan Harmony-Win Capital Management told Bloomberg that "it should be easy for copper to reach $15,000."

Who actually gets paid

The clean read-through is to miners that sell the refined metal, because a higher LME price lands almost directly in the revenue line. Hindustan Copper rose about 3.6% to Rs 527.25 on Tuesday on exactly that logic — its Q1 FY27 revenue was already up 81.4% YoY with net profit up 162.5%, so the rally has an earnings anchor, not just momentum. The flip side is everyone who buys copper rod: India's cable, wire and transformer makers use copper as their single largest raw-material input, so a record LME price shows up as a gross-margin squeeze one or two quarters later unless they can pass it through.

The one thing that flips this: Washington finally publishing that overdue Section 232 copper decision. If the tariff lands lighter or later than the market has priced, the arbitrage pull stops and some of that 695,624 tonnes starts flowing back out of US sheds. Watch whether LME warehouse stocks begin rebuilding and whether the steep backwardation in the futures curve flattens — that's the tell that the squeeze is unwinding, well before the price tells you.

As of 2:45 pm IST, 8 September 2026. Sources: Business Standard, Seoul Economic Daily, Business Standard (Hindustan Copper). For discussion and education only — not investment advice. Verify before acting.