Commentary The shortened U.S. trading week restarted on the Fourth of July with an enormous bang. Not some leftover fireworks, but rather chaos, disorder, and serious illiquidity across global financials. Most of it was focused, tellingly, on commodities, those like copper and oil which have until recently “benefited” maybe the most (apart from aluminum or nickel) from favorable supply-side bottlenecks.
Those supply constraints haven’t disappeared — for the metal, they’ve gotten worse.
Crude benchmarks crashed while Dr. Copper foretold of serious and growing demand difficulties ahead. As much of the American public already “feels”, there’s more than a whiff of recession in the air….