Copper eases to near 2-week low after Trump’s Greenland backtrack

LONDON: Copper fell to its lowest in almost two weeks on Thursday as markets were calmed by U.S. President Donald Trump’s pledge not to take Greenland by force and his retraction of planned tariffs on countries opposed to his taking over the Arctic island.

Benchmark three-month copper on the London Metal Exchange was down 1.3% to $12,640 per metric ton as of 1034 GMT. It touched $12,621 earlier in the session, the lowest since January 9. The contract hit a record high of $13,407 last week.

Trump on Wednesday ruled out using military force to take over Greenland and said he would no longer be imposing tariffs on European allies that he had threatened to put into effect on February 1.

“The anxiety drops out of the market and everything pulls back because the primary driver is no longer at play,” Panmure Liberum analyst Tom Price said. Investors will start withdrawing money from their cautious positions, which will likely hit commodity prices over the next few days, he added.

The rally in industrial metals this year “really doesn’t have anything to do with supply-demand specifics … because we can’t see any change in those,” Price said.

The cash LME copper contract was trading at an $84 per ton discount to the three-month forward, after surging to a more than $100 premium on Tuesday, indicating little need for short-term metal.

LME copper stocks have risen to 168,250 tons, the highest since May 2025, after 8,725 tons of inflows into warehouses in the United States. Still, LME stocks are dwarfed by the more than 500,000 tons of copper in Comex warehouses.

The arbitrage to ship copper to Comex from the LME has either narrowed or closed, traders said.

“A negative arb incentivises shipments back to the LME, helping explain the stock increase, while Comex inventories continue to rise in parallel,” Sucden Financial said in a note.

Aluminium nudged up 0.1% to $3,116.50 a ton, zinc gained 0.7% to $3,197, lead added 0.1% to $2,023, nickel climbed 0.2% to $18,030 and tin dropped 0.7% to $51,055.