Copper's at a record. So is the panic buying it

The cash price for LME copper hit $14,453.60 a ton on 11 August, but the number that should worry industrial buyers is the spread: cash copper now trades $171 above three-month futures, the widest gap since October last year, as Reuters reports. That's not a demand story so much as a logistics one. The Democratic Republic of Congo's export ban on copper and cobalt concentrates, combined with a rush of US importers front-running possible tariffs (record imports above 200,000 metric tons in July alone), has pulled metal out of LME warehouses faster than it can be replaced. Readily available LME stock sat at just 92,900 tons in early August. Bank of America reckons the supply gap could widen to 500,000 tons this year. Fabricators locked into annual contracts are about to discover the difference between the price they budgeted for and the price they'll actually pay to get metal delivered this month.

China's own regulators are reportedly discussing curbs on overseas access to its most advanced models, holding meetings with Alibaba, ByteDance and Z.ai in mid-2026 about restricting exactly the export channel that made DeepSeek a household name, according to Reuters. That's the twist worth sitting with. Chinese open-weight models now sit deep in developer stacks, enterprise procurement and public-sector systems across emerging markets, and a national standard, GB/T 44272-2024, already governs how their licensing works domestically. If Beijing tiers access, basic tools filed openly, frontier models restricted, foreign developers who built on free Chinese weights inherit a supply risk they didn't sign up for. The commercial upside of cheap, capable AI drew the world in; the governance strings attached to it were always going to follow.

Trump told Hegseth on Sunday to 'substantially reduce' the Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises set to run 17 to 27 August, involving roughly 18,000 South Korean troops, saying on Truth Social the drills are 'costly' and send a 'totally inappropriate and hostile' signal to a North Korea he calls 'unthreatening and respectful.' The trigger, by his own account: Seoul told him 'No thanks' when asked to help pressure Iran on denuclearization. This lands days after North Korea's second missile test in a week and Pyongyang's warning that the drills plus a new US nuclear strategy would spark a 'fresh arms race,' as Bloomberg reported. It also follows a pattern: spring's Freedom Shield exercises were already cut from 51 field maneuvers to 22. Seoul now has to decide whether reduced US commitment is the price of staying out of Washington's Iran diplomacy.

A federal judge blocked the Pentagon's designation of WuXi AppTec as a Chinese military company on 7 August, granting a preliminary injunction that Reuters says found the listing likely 'arbitrary and capricious.' The stock had already been sliding since the 8 June designation; now it's up roughly 100% from those lows, per Bloomberg, because WuXi makes the drug-product ingredients behind much of the West's GLP-1 supply and investors have decided no amount of national-security paperwork changes that this quarter. UBS and BlackRock remain shareholders of record. The injunction buys time, not certainty: the BIOSECURE Act still looms, and a five-year wind-down clause for existing contracts pushes the real deadline into the 2030s. Merck, Novo Nordisk and every other Western pharma client leaning on WuXi's Chinese factories just got a reprieve, not an answer.

Spot gold is sitting near $4,400 an ounce, roughly a two-month high, after July's US CPI print came in at 3.4% year-on-year, the second straight month of cooling, per Reuters. Market-implied odds of a September Fed hike have fallen to around 34 to 40%, down from over 50% before the data. But energy prices are rebounding, and that's the complication nobody's pricing cleanly: headline inflation could reaccelerate even as core cools, which is exactly the scenario that keeps gold as useful a hedge against a Fed mistake as against inflation itself. Gold is up about 10% month-to-date in August. Silver tagged along, gaining 1% to $65.94 an ounce in the same session.

CEO Bob White, a Medtronic veteran who took over in June 2025, is running Olympus through a private-equity playbook while it's still a public company: cutting roughly 2,000 jobs, about 7% of the global workforce, targeting ¥24 billion in supply-chain savings, and centralizing an organisation that used to run region by region, according to Bloomberg. The logic is blunt. Olympus already sold its microscope business to Bain Capital for ¥428 billion in 2023 and its cameras business before that, leaving a leaner, higher-margin medtech company that is exactly the kind of asset buyout firms circle. So White is trying to capture that value himself, acquiring BioProtect for around $270 million to build out prostate cancer tech rather than waiting for someone else to make the same bet. Analysts have already responded: price targets are up from ¥1,700 to ¥2,300, a re-rating of roughly 35% that makes Olympus a much more expensive company to take private than it was a year ago.

Burger King's US same-store sales rose 8.5% last quarter while Wendy's fell 7%, and the gap traces back to a chef, not a discount, as the Wall Street Journal reports. Amy Alarcon, who helped build the Popeyes chicken sandwich into a 2019 phenomenon, redesigned the Whopper's bun, mayonnaise and packaging after customers kept complaining the burger arrived crushed in its paper wrap. Franchisees eat roughly $4,000 a year in extra cost per store for the new build, and Burger King told them not to raise prices to cover it. Whopper sales are up 20% on the old version, and the chain has now posted five straight quarters of US sales growth. Wendy's has lost its second-place ranking for the first time in years, and no amount of value-menu pricing has stopped the slide.

Federal prosecutors and the SEC are examining whether four firms, ABS Capital, Amistad Financial, Bradford Allen and Hudson Trading, were used to route loans from Mark Walter's insurers to other Walter-affiliated businesses in a way that made related-party lending look like arm's-length credit, according to the Wall Street Journal. Delaware Life and Clear Spring Life and Annuity, the two insurers at the centre of it, have since concluded that $21 billion of loans should have been booked as related-party exposure rather than third-party debt, per Bloomberg. Grand jury subpoenas landed in February; the companies only disclosed the probe publicly in June filings. The Dodgers and Lakers owner runs roughly $85 billion through these two insurers alone, and the question prosecutors are chasing isn't whether the money moved, it's whether anyone was supposed to know it never left the family.

NAB's fiscal Q3 cash earnings came in at A$1.83 billion, technically up 2% on the prior two quarters but below consensus, and the market punished the mortgage numbers underneath it: home loan applications fell 15% quarter-on-quarter, with investor borrowing down 17% and owner-occupier lending down 14%, according to reporting cited by MarketScreener. NAB now expects negative growth in investor home loans over the next financial year. Loans flagged as 'on watch' rose 8% in the quarter. This isn't NAB-specific weakness; brokers now see system-wide mortgage credit growth falling from around 7% to 3 to 4% over the next 12 to 18 months as Australia's housing tax reforms bite investor demand. NAB stock is down more than 20% since late February, and the read-through for every other major Australian bank reporting this month is not encouraging.

The Bank of Thailand holds its policy rate at 1% on 26 August, and strategists expect no change, which is precisely the problem for anyone long the baht right now. MUFG's Lloyd Chan says the central bank's commitment to that rate to support growth will keep the currency under pressure as long as US yields stay elevated, according to Livemint. Kasikorn Research puts a number on the risk: if oil holds above $100 a barrel, the baht could slide toward 33 per dollar, eroding Thailand's trade surplus. The BoT has openly signalled it will tolerate 'orderly weakness' rather than defend the currency with rate hikes, so every rally traders have seen this year has faded fast once dollar softness passes. Thai importers hedging near-term dollar exposure are the ones actually paying for this policy stance.

India reclassified high-purity silver bars from 'Free' to 'Restricted' import status in May, and the effect was immediate: shipments collapsed from 747 tonnes in January to just 29 tonnes in June, according to Metals Focus data cited by Bloomberg. Domestic premiums over international prices jumped to $6.5 an ounce, the highest 30-day average since Metals Focus started tracking the metric in 2019, a sharp reversal from discounts of up to $5.5 an ounce as recently as May. More than 90% of India's silver imports now need a licence from the Directorate General of Foreign Trade, even through previously trusted channels like RBI-nominated banks. Licences have started flowing again, around 100 tonnes for banks and 300 tonnes for traders, which pulled premiums down to $4.7 an ounce by late July. Traders are still queuing for paperwork because arbitraging a government-created price gap beats almost anything else on offer right now.

FY26 China-label formula sales fell about 14% after freight and customs delays gutted supply in April and May; the company now guides to materially weaker margins through December 2026 even as the bottleneck itself has cleared, per Bloomberg.

Chassis 0 of the Luce, Ferrari's debut electric model, went at a Monterey charity auction against a $1.1 million pre-sale estimate, with proceeds going to the Ferrari Foundation and the buyer not getting the car until 2027, according to Bloomberg.

The Chinese skincare giant's 2025 revenue fell 1.7% and its core Proya brand dropped roughly 10% domestically, so it's launching in the US through Ulta Beauty to chase the growth K-beauty found a decade ago, per the Wall Street Journal.

The evening supply gap widened to 3,045 MW in June from 1,225 MW in April, because 150 GW of solar capacity goes dark at sunset just as air-conditioning load peaks, according to Indian government data reported by the Tribune.

Analyst sentiment on the world's biggest miner has never been this cautious ahead of a results day, a striking backdrop given copper is simultaneously hitting record highs on the LME.