Welcome to Lord Copper

Opinions about lots of things - mostly related to the worlds' metal markets

Will the machine stop?

23 June 2021

If I mention E M Forster, what comes to your mind? A Room with a View, Howard’s End and A Passage to India? Lush Merchant Ivory films, early twentieth-century middle and upper-middle class English social life and the last knockings of the Raj? (Incidentally, and I wasn’t ware of this, although he lived until 1970, his final novel was A Passage to India, published in 1924 - which presumably left lots of time for other things.)

Will G7 vaccine promises help Zambia?

17 June 2021

With seagulls under instruction from Vladimir Putin to poop-bomb delegates at the G7 in Carbis Bay with drone-like accuracy, please spare a thought for Zambia.

Muffle the lych bell!

16 June 2021

So, my expectation that the LME Ring was doomed turns out - for the moment at any rate - to be wrong. After the sounding of the passing bell and the death knell, we’ll have to put a muffler on the lych bell, as the body is in fact not approaching the churchyard and the grave.

Compromise - not a dirty word?

09 June 2021

All being well, the LME ring will re-open for business on September 6, the bells will ring every five minutes, the screens will light up again, and what could have been the lost art of open-outcry trading will make a triumphal return.

Somewhere over the Rainbow

02 June 2021

In the rainbow of carbon-neutral scenarios being embraced enthusiastically by the general public, a rising claimant for attention as the fuel of the future is that most abundant element of them all, hydrogen. The good news is there is a lot of it. Almost three-quarters of the mass of the universe apparently is hydrogen.

Finding a new cause

26 May 2021

It seems now that Cecil Rhodes is set to stay up in his eerie on the front of Oriel College, Oxford, looking out at the High Street, after the decision of the Governing Body of the college. I’m not entirely convinced by their reasoning, but you take the good where you can.

What made the crypto piggy bank grunt?

19 May 2021

When I visited NASA about 20 years ago, and looked through the glass from the gallery into Mission Control it was a strange feeling. Like visiting New York for the first time – I had seen it all before but only remotely on film. I thought I knew it, but I didn’t. It was smaller than I thought. Stripped of its drama it was just like any other open plan office.