Daily iron ore price update (free fall)

Here are the iron ore charts for January 26, 2015:

Carnage. Paper markets aren’t too bad with the 12 month trying to find a bottom and six month futures still not at new lows (don’t blink). But the bottom has fallen out of physical markets with Qingdao iron ore down 4.3% yesterday to $63.54 (above table is two days). Benchmark fell $2.60 to $63.30. Chinese port inventories fell again, by 450k tonnes, but remain high. Rebar average is toast and I’ve added a long term chart for perspective. Steel demand clearly stinks.

Reuters has texture:

Cooling Chinese steel demand forced some steel mills to bring forward plant maintenance, which usually takes place during the Chinese New Year, which falls on Feb. 19. Mills looked to curb oversupply that helped knock nearly a third off prices last year in the world’s top producer of the alloy.

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About the author

David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.