Welcome to Lord Copper

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

What is the point of books?

08 July 2020

The year is 1991 and I am in Tallinn hunting for metal. The surprising and cataclysmic end of the Soviet Union is a shifting of the tectonic plates. From the point of view of a metal merchant, the sudden outflows of metal, once destined for the military, are a sort of prize.

Keeping Elephants off the Track

01 July 2020

It’s been three months now and by general agreement I have not written about the dreaded coronavirus. As the wonderful physician Hans Rosling once began one of his lectures (look them up, they are brilliant) “I am now going to talk about statistics. Don’t leave! Statistics can be very interesting!” So I am going to talk about statistics. Don’t log out!

The Passing Bell

24 June 2020

We’ve written a couple of times here before about the closure and (potential) re-opening of the LME Ring, and speculated to an extent on whether or not it will happen.

All the good men this world's ever known

17 June 2020

“When all the stars are falling down, Into the sea and on the ground, And angry voices carry on the wind. A beam of light will fill your head And you’ll remember what’s been said By all the good men this world’s ever known.”

Flash as they come

10 June 2020

So statue-destroying has reached a provincial British city, as Edward Colston was toppled from his plinth and dumped into the river by a mob of protestors/rioters. I’ve expressed my views about the foolishness of pretending one can eliminate the bits of the past one doesn’t like before, so I’m not going to repeat it all again, but there are just a few comments - first, who’s next? And secondly, the revolution always eats its children - just ask Robespierre, Danton, Trotsky, for example.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

03 June 2020

It gives me absolutely no pleasure whatsoever to write this, but I believe we are approaching the time when we may have to begin to think about writing the epitaph for the EU. It’s been there pretty much all my life, and the UK has been a member all my adult years.

On a Marché sur la Lune

27 May 2020

Buying metals from Russia in the 1990s was always a serious business. But there were times when, I confess, I felt more like Tintin than James Bond. The occasion I felt this most keenly was sometime in 1993 when a good friend of mine, who had travelled frequently with me to Russia on hunting trips, decided to deliver some little sacks of rhenium metal powder in his Beechcraft four-seater airplane to Fairoaks’ Airport near Woking, rather than Heathrow.