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Welcome to Lord Copper

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

Lehman Brothers - a Family Business

12 June 2019

If you haven’t seen The Lehman Trilogy, go and see it. And, if you are not a theatre type, don’t worry; the Piccadilly Theatre will, outrageously, sell you a nice big glass of wine to gulp in your seat

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Battlefields

05 June 2019

I’ve just spent a few days visiting the Somme battlefield, in northern France, which I last did about fifteen years ago. For the metal trader, of course, the opportunities as World War One finished were enormous, in the volume of scrap available for collection.

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Why be a Politician when you can be a Metal Trader?

29 May 2019

I suppose you know you are getting old when the prospect of attending a funeral is more appealing than the thought of a wedding. At least funerals are shorter and the music is better.

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Hurrah! More Voting!

22 May 2019

Hot on the heels of the local elections of which some of us in the UK have been privileged to experience the excitement, comes the next fun-packed iteration of voting: the Euro elections. And this time, it’s not just for us in the UK, but Europe-wide. We seem to be sticking with the current policy of averaging at least an election per year - well, why not, because they always produce such sterling results, don’t they?

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So who are the Barbarians?

15 May 2019

I know I’ve written here before about Constantine Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians”, but another thought about how apt it is in the current circumstance has just occurred to me.

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Energy Inconsistency

08 May 2019

When I was a child, things powered by batteries always had one big failing - the batteries went flat, and, on the whole, the house never contained the right ones to replace them immediately. I know - the hardships of a first-world childhood…….

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Well Done, LME

01 May 2019

There may be rival claims from Shanghai or New York, but the reality is that the LME is still the most influential metal exchange around. That’s partly because it got there first, it was founded in the world’s most significant trading city and it benefitted from a legal system accepted and trusted by the world’s traders, but also because it has managed to keep itself up to date and to listen to the industry that it serves.

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