Pablo Hill: An Unmistakable Pattern in Copper

“Copper continues to be unstoppable.”

– Leonardo Suarez

Turn Your Images On

Copper’s price soars as investors rediscover the metal’s utility

December 8, 2025 — In the late 1970s, Texas oilmen Nelson and William Hunt attempted one of the boldest commodity plays in modern history.

By accumulating 200 million ounces of physical silver and layering on massive futures positions, they tried to corner the market.

Their theory was simple: create scarcity, trigger a squeeze, and let global prices rise under their control.

For a brief moment, the plan worked. Silver rocketed to $50 per ounce in early 1980 as traders scrambled for metal. But instability drew government intervention, liquidity vanished, and the Hunts were forced to unwind their positions.

The collapse was swift.

Turn Your Images On

The episode remains instructive because it demonstrated how quickly a commodity market can be reshaped when one actor becomes the marginal buyer.

The Hunts failed, but they revealed the underlying physics of market power: whoever can pull physical supply toward themselves shapes global price, liquidity, and narrative.

That lesson is resurfacing today, only on a global scale, and the commodity at the center of it is not silver but copper.

The world’s monetary order is not ultimately anchored by interest rates or policy guidance but by the materials that civilization cannot function without.

Economists debate models; commodity traders count barrels, tons, and ships. Power belongs to the nation capable of attracting and absorbing strategic resources.

Turn Your Images On

China spent more than a decade building such influence through the Shanghai Gold Exchange, using domestic premiums to pull gold from West to East.

The United States has now developed its own gravitational pull, not through decree but through incentives embedded in policy and markets. The mechanism is arbitrage, and the metal being drawn in is copper.

Turn Your Images On

In late 2025, copper began behaving like money. Prices broke out of their post-Thanksgiving range and surged to an all-time high of $11,294.50 per ton on the London Metal Exchange. COMEX futures in New York rose sharply at the same time, widening the spread between U.S. and London pricing as traders rushed to ship physical metal into the United States ahead of new tariff threats.

The pattern was unmistakable: a new price center was forming.

As copper flowed into the United States, LME inventories thinned and backwardation steepened. Higher U.S. pricing, tariff protection, and lower political risk made American warehouses the most attractive destination for metal. Each new shipment strengthened the spread.

The arbitrage, once triggered, became self-reinforcing. Traders were not participating in theory; they were responding to the physical incentives in front of them.

The United States had quietly become the marginal buyer of the world’s most important industrial metal. China, long the gravitational center of global copper demand, found itself on the outside.

CESCO data presented in Shanghai showed Chinese demand weakening quarter-to-date despite modest year-to-date growth, but the specifics barely mattered. Copper was moving west.

Pablo Hill
The Monetary Skeptic & Grey Swan Investment Fraternity

P.S. from Addison: Pablo’s with Grey Swan contributor, Shad Marquitz, who has been long and strong copper for several years during the build-out of data centers for AI.

The metal should benefit as demand grows globally and remain in high gear. Paid-up Fraternity members can read Shad’s insights surrounding the commodity markets in the latest monthly Grey Swan Bulletin.

As Shad mentioned explicitly in our November issue:

Thus far, the diagnosis of the economy by Doctor Copper has been spot on, because the economy didn’t fall apart and go to hell-in-a-hand-basket in 2022, 2023, 2024, or thus far in 2025.

Copper continues to be a good measuring stick for economic growth around the world, and the supply/demand fundamentals remain structurally bullish on the red metal for the next few years and beyond.

After a strong move higher this year in gold, silver, and copper, the metals are taking a necessary breather before they can push to new highs.

We’ll see what the final month of the year – and 2026 brings – for all commodities, including copper. We expect further upside.

Turn Your Images On

If you have requests for new guests you’d like to see join us for Grey Swan Live!, or have any questions for our guests, send them here.

“Copper continues to be unstoppable.”

– Leonardo Suarez

Turn Your Images On

Copper’s price soars as investors rediscover the metal’s utility

December 8, 2025 — In the late 1970s, Texas oilmen Nelson and William Hunt attempted one of the boldest commodity plays in modern history.

By accumulating 200 million ounces of physical silver and layering on massive futures positions, they tried to corner the market.

Their theory was simple: create scarcity, trigger a squeeze, and let global prices rise under their control.

The collapse was swift.

Turn Your Images On

The episode remains instructive because it demonstrated how quickly a commodity market can be reshaped when one actor becomes the marginal buyer.

The Hunts failed, but they revealed the underlying physics of market power: whoever can pull physical supply toward themselves shapes global price, liquidity, and narrative.

That lesson is resurfacing today, only on a global scale, and the commodity at the center of it is not silver but copper.

The world’s monetary order is not ultimately anchored by interest rates or policy guidance but by the materials that civilization cannot function without.

Economists debate models; commodity traders count barrels, tons, and ships. Power belongs to the nation capable of attracting and absorbing strategic resources.

Turn Your Images On

China spent more than a decade building such influence through the Shanghai Gold Exchange, using domestic premiums to pull gold from West to East.

Turn Your Images On

The pattern was unmistakable: a new price center was forming.

The arbitrage, once triggered, became self-reinforcing. Traders were not participating in theory; they were responding to the physical incentives in front of them.

The United States had quietly become the marginal buyer of the world’s most important industrial metal. China, long the gravitational center of global copper demand, found itself on the outside.

CESCO data presented in Shanghai showed Chinese demand weakening quarter-to-date despite modest year-to-date growth, but the specifics barely mattered. Copper was moving west.

Pablo Hill
The Monetary Skeptic & Grey Swan Investment Fraternity

P.S. from Addison: Pablo’s with Grey Swan contributor, Shad Marquitz, who has been long and strong copper for several years during the build-out of data centers for AI.

As Shad mentioned explicitly in our November issue:

Thus far, the diagnosis of the economy by Doctor Copper has been spot on, because the economy didn’t fall apart and go to hell-in-a-hand-basket in 2022, 2023, 2024, or thus far in 2025.

Copper continues to be a good measuring stick for economic growth around the world, and the supply/demand fundamentals remain structurally bullish on the red metal for the next few years and beyond.

After a strong move higher this year in gold, silver, and copper, the metals are taking a necessary breather before they can push to new highs.

We’ll see what the final month of the year – and 2026 brings – for all commodities, including copper. We expect further upside.

Turn Your Images On

If you have requests for new guests you’d like to see join us for Grey Swan Live!, or have any questions for our guests, send them here.

Under the frost-crusted shrubs, the bears are sniffing around for scraps of bloody meat.

They smell the subtle rot of credit stress, central-bank desperation, and debt that’s beginning to steam in the cold. They’re not charging — not yet. But they’re present. Watching. Testing the doors.

Retail investors, last in line, await the Fed’s final announcement of the year on Wednesday. Then the central planners of the world get their turn: the Bank of England, Bank of Japan, and the European Central Bank.

Treasuries just suffered their worst week since June. And in Japan — the quiet godfather of global liquidity — something fundamental is breaking.

Silver continues its blistering ascent. Gold and bitcoin have settled in at $4,200 and $92,000, respectively.

It’s absurd, really, for any politician to be talking about “affordability.”

The data is clear. If higher prices are your goal, let the government “fix” them.

Mandates, paperwork, and busybodies telling you what you can and can’t do – it’s not a surprise why costs add up.

In contrast, if you want lower prices, do nothing– zilch. Let the market work.

For 30 years, Japan was the land where interest rates went to die.

The Bank of Japan used yield-curve control to keep long-term rates sedated. Traders joked that shorting Japanese bonds was the “widow-maker trade.”

Not anymore.

On November 20, 2025, everything changed. Quietly, but decisively.

The Bank of Japan finally pulled the plug on decades of easy money. Negative rates were removed. Yield-curve control was abandoned. The policy rate was lifted to a 17-year high.

Suddenly, global markets had to reprice something they had ignored for years.

What happens when the world’s largest creditor nation stops exporting cheap capital and starts pulling it back home?

The answer came fast. Bond yields in Europe and the United States began climbing. The Japanese yen strengthened sharply. Wall Street faltered.

The rate cut narrative is calcifying into gospel: the Fed must cut to save the consumer.

Bankrate reports that 59% of Americans cannot cover a $1,000 emergency without debt or selling something. And yet stocks are roaring, liquidity junkies are celebrating, and the top 10% now account for half of all consumer spending.

Here’s the plot twist: before 2020, consumer confidence faithfully tracked equity markets. After 2020, that relationship broke. As one analyst put it, “The poor don’t hate stocks going up. They just don’t feel it anymore.”

So when the Fed cuts rates in one of the hottest stock markets in history, who exactly benefits? Not the 59%. Not the middle. Certainly not anyone renting and watching shelter inflation devour their paycheck.