LONDON (Reuters) – Fears of a global recession are rising. Industrial metals such as copper are struggling to make any price headway as funds take an increasingly negative view of where the global manufacturing economy is heading.
The tiny tin market seems to be already trading as if recession were a reality. London Metal Exchange (LME) tin lurched sharply lower at the beginning of July and has kept falling ever since, touching a fresh three-year low of $16,255 per tonne on Monday.
That’s lower than the Global Financial Crisis sell-off in 2009 and the price is now approaching the decade’s lows seen over the 2015-2016 metallic bear market.
Core demand weakness is coming from the semiconductor sector, where cyclical downturn is exacerbated by the current trade tensions between Japan and South Korea. In textbook commodity market fashion, the price slump appears to have wrong-footed producers, at least one of which has been boosting output significantly.
The slide in the tin price has been accompanied by rising LME warehouse stocks, which have rebuilt from just 740 tonnes at the start of May to a current 6,175 tonnes.
For the rest of this column: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-metals-tin-ahome/column-tiny-tin-market-sounds-a-recessionary-warning-note-idUKKCN1VA184