| There are four (maybe five) market sources of copper inventory: LME and Comex are the biggies and they report daily. Right now it's 243,950 LME and 231,818 Comex. I find Comex a bit suspect (see my silver commentary), they can play games on delivery, and they will be called on to deliver, trust me . Will they play paper games, cash in lieu of? The smaller markets, Tocom, Singapore and Shanghai are reported to be out. I'm sure there is copper being hoarded as a speculative crack-up boom play, and that's hard to gauge, doubt if Meger or I or any one else has any idea what that might be. Also because things are so seized up and bottlenecked within China, there is probably product "laying around" or sitting in some harbor. Finally there is mine inventory: Codelco already sold their excess inventory, it's out the door, nobody else is holding anything off the market, customers are insisting on delivery. The wild card might be Grasberg, if they can somehow get back on line early, that would postpone the day of reckoning a month or so. A production problem or a strike somewhere, push the schedule up. The point is that we don't have to go to zero, to have a hell of a Train Wreck. The deficit is just too large, even if you use very conservative figures. |
