Trump Utters A Single Sentence, Copper Spikes Nearly 20% In Minutes

This afternoon, copper experienced its largest surge in history over the span of a few minutes.

Jul 08, 2025

“I believe the tariff on copper, we’re going to make it 50%,”

With those simple words, President Trump sent copper futures soaring from $5.01/lb to $5.90/lb over the span of a few minutes.

In 2025, there’s a new surprise every day, today it was copper.

Today’s nearly 20% move higher represents copper’s largest move ever in such a short period of time. The 9.51% daily gain also appears to be the largest single day gain in history for the red metal. In addition, today’s closing level is a new all-time high closing price for Comex copper:

Copper (Daily)

Copper’s enormous global market size (~$200 billion annually) makes 20% spikes unlikely. However, when the President of one of the world’s largest copper importers suddenly slaps on a 50% tariff, historical precedent is of little value.

Despite the spike in copper futures, the COPX (Global X Copper Miners ETF) is still down 1.74% on the week:

COPX (Daily)

While the US import tariff on copper stands to benefit domestic copper producers, the wider implications on the copper mining industry are much less clear. There is potential for retaliation from US trading partners, in addition to supply chain disruptions.

What I find to be the most interesting about this apparent 50% tariff on copper imports is that we will find out the elasticity of demand for refined copper in the US. It seems that Trump 2.0’s assumption is that end users won’t pass on much of the copper price increase.

This is a risky assumption. It is hard to make a coherent argument for how a 50% copper tariff won’t increase price levels for all types of finished products throughout the US economy.

Meanwhile, domestic industry will aggressively mobilize to either substitute the copper it consumes, or find ways to produce more refined copper domestically.

The US consumes roughly 1.7 million tonnes of refined copper annually, with ~50% of that total derived from imports. While the domestic mining of copper (~1.1 million tonnes annually) isn’t large enough to meet consumption, the real bottleneck is smelting and refining capacity.

With the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill and today’s copper import tariff announcement, it is increasingly likely that the USA’s 3rd copper smelter (Hayden Smelter near the Ray Mine in the Arizona Copper Belt) will be coming back online within the next year. Grupo Mexico is already making moves to secure the regulatory and labor breakthroughs required to bring Hayden back into operation.

The attractiveness of advanced exploration and development stage copper assets in the western US has never been greater.

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