(Bloomberg) — Metals surged in volatile trading on Friday, with silver and copper hitting fresh records, after a chaotic hours-long outage on CME Group’s Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
Silver jumped as much as 5.9% to $56.53 an ounce, surpassing a peak set during a historic squeeze in the London market in October. The white metal has been supported by rising hopes of a Federal Reserve interest-rate cut in December, inflows into bullion-backed exchange-traded funds and ongoing supply tightness. Copper surged against the backdrop of supply shortfalls and bullish price predictions.
The record-setting moves came amid low Black Friday trading volumes in the US following the CME disruptions. Spreads between what dealers and sellers would buy and sell gold for briefly surged earlier, signaling an illiquid market. As most trading operations resumed early in the US morning, futures on the London Metal Exchange extended their rally.
Spot silver traded at $56.50 an ounce as of 3:02 p.m. in New York. Gold rose 1.3% while platinum traded 3.5% higher. LME copper futures settled 2.3% higher in London after earlier hitting a fresh record of $11,210.50 a ton.
Silver’s new high comes just over a month after a severe supply squeeze in the dominant trading hub in London last month, which sent prices soaring above levels in Shanghai and New York. While the arrival of nearly 54 million troy ounces has eased that squeeze, the market still remains markedly tight with the cost of borrowing the metal over one month hovering above its normal level.
The flows into the London market have now put pressure on other hubs, including in China. Silver inventories in warehouses linked to the Shanghai Futures Exchange recently hit their lowest level since 2015, according to bourse data.
“In the short term, a further price increase cannot be ruled out if registered silver inventories in China continue to decline,” analysts at Commerzbank AG wrote in a note earlier Friday.
Traders are also monitoring any potential tariff on silver after the precious metal was added to the US Geological Survey list of critical minerals this month. While 75 million ounces have left Comex vaults since early October, fears of a sudden premium for US silver have caused some traders to hesitate before shipping metal out of the country.
Silver has surged more than 90% this year, as investors pile into alternative assets in a wider retreat from government bonds and currencies, dubbed the debasement trade. Optimism about the metal’s fundamental supply-and-demand balance have also supported prices — the market is set to see a fifth consecutive supply deficit this year. Unlike gold, a large share of silver demand is industrial, with applications in solar cells and electronics.
Copper’s latest leg-up comes after miners, smelters and traders met in Shanghai this week, with discussions focused on a tightening market. Kostas Bintas, the high-profile head of metals at Mercuria Energy Group Ltd., renewed his bullish prediction, warning that a rush to ship metal to the US risks draining the rest of the world’s inventories.
“This is the big one,” he said in an interview at the end of an industry conference in Shanghai organized by the Center for Copper and Mining Studies, or CESCO. “If the world keeps going like this we will be left without copper cathodes in the rest of the world.”
Traders have been ramping up shipments to the US in recent weeks to once again capitalize on a big premium for metal on the Comex, fueled by ongoing uncertainty about the potential for future tariffs.
Friday’s surge is “a response to very bullish headlines coming out of CESCO Shanghai, focusing on the pull of US units into the country creating tightness ex-US,” said Natalie Scott-Gray, senior metals analyst at StoneX Financial Ltd.
“This comes against a backdrop in which we already, for year-end, have a perfect storm bull narrative,” she said, citing the anticipation of tariffs, an improving macroeconomic outlook and supply disruptions.
Copper has found further support in rising expectations of further monetary easing by the Fed, which could propel growth and demand in the world’s biggest economy.
–With assistance from Charlie Zhu and Winnie Zhu.
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