Daily iron ore price update (port hilarity)

Monday, 15 May 2017

Iron ore price chats for May 12, 2017:

Tianjin benchmark fell 1.7% to $59.50. Paper firmed overnight. Steel is still OK but with the Beijing OBOR conference over and production set to resume that can’t last. Hilariously, port stocks of iron ore surged 2.3mt last week to a record a new all-time high of 134.25mt.

In short, we’ve lost 37% of price while inventories have gained. The only way I can think of of expressing how bearish this is is the following picture:

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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.