Spot down hard with Tianjin benchmark -2.3% to $56.10. Paper down harder. Rebar down hard. Port stocks were off 750k tonnes to 94.45 million tonnes in a sign that mills are drawing inventory to combat price hikes. Reuters has texture:
China‘s output of key industrial commodities including coal and steel continued to shrink in the first two months of the year amid chronic oversupply, while crude oil production slipped as a global price slump took its toll.
“China’s recent National People’s Congress provided some positive news for commodity markets by stimulating domestic demand and outlining structural reforms,” analysts with ANZ Research said in a commodities note on Friday.
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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.
