Metals and mining stocks sold off across the board on Thursday as a US producer price report and crude oil above $105 a barrel pushed the odds of a Federal Reserve rate increase next week to about 70%, and a report that the White House copper tariff plan has stalled pulled the rug from under a metal that had set records in four straight sessions.
Comex copper for December delivery fell as much as 5.4% to $6.5160 a pound in New York, a day after settling at a record $6.8885, and was trading at $6.5220 (about $14,380 a tonne) in early afternoon, down 5.3% and just above the day’s low. Comex gold for December delivery dropped as much as 2.1% to $4,365.40 an ounce before paring the loss to 1.6% at $4,391.00, while December silver slid as much as 6.1% to $64.455 and was last at $64.575, down 5.9%. Platinum and palladium each lost more than 6%.
Copper’s drop followed a Reuters report that the White House has not decided on refined copper tariffs as officials weigh the risk of higher manufacturing costs ahead of November’s midterm elections, a possibility the market had all but priced out after traders spent the year hauling metal into US warehouses. Hedge funds are heavily long and the metal’s correlation with the S&P 500 sits at multidecade highs, leaving little cushion when the tariff premium wobbled.
Gold came under pressure from Brent crude spiking on rising tensions in the Middle East with swap traders lifting the probability of a September hike from roughly 60% earlier in the day, with consumer price figures on Friday the last major release before the Fed meets. Silver, which had outrun gold on the way up in August, fell more than four times as far as bullion, and platinum and palladium fell with it as the dollar and Treasury yields both firmed after the data.
Copper stocks hammered
Freeport-McMoRan, the largest listed copper producer, was down over 7% in early afternoon trade in New York, and the 15 million shares that had changed hands by then already exceeded a full day’s average volume over the past two weeks. The drop cut Freeport’s market value to $101.7 billion, and another 2% would take it back below the $100 billion mark it crossed in the August rally for the first time.
Teck Resources was also trading at a day’s normal volume before the lunch hour, down more than 6% and Southern Copper fell by a similar margin, wiping over $10 billion from the Mexican company. Antofagasta lost 7% in over-the-counter trade, Anglo American, Lundin Mining and First Quantum all fell more than 6%. Ivanhoe Mines gave back 5% after a 17% run over the past week on the expansion of its Makoko discovery in the DRC. The diversified majors were dragged along: BHP fell 6% in New York and Rio Tinto more than 4%.
The selloff lands on a sector coming off its best month on record. The August rally added $357 billion to the value of the world’s 50 biggest miners, the largest monthly gain ever, as gold rose about 10% and copper pushed toward $7 a pound on the US tariff trade.
Tariff plan stalls
The White House has yet to decide on duties for refined copper, two people familiar with the matter said, with the administration increasingly focused on affordability as Republicans face pressure to show their policies are lowering costs rather than raising them. A White House official confirmed the Commerce Department delivered its update by the June 30 deadline and said the administration “continues to evaluate all options to reshore copper and other critical manufacturing back to the United States,” which is some way short of the 15% tariff from January 2027, rising to 30% in 2028, that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was asked to consider.
The episode echoes 2025, when the market braced for a blanket tariff on everything containing copper and Trump settled in July that year for levies on pipes, wiring and other semi-finished products. In the meantime the trade has pulled a record 695,624 tonnes into Comex warehouses, more than double what is left in LME and Shanghai sheds combined.
“As long as tariff policy remains unresolved, that possibility reduces the incentive to return metal to international markets,” said Jacob White, minerals analyst at Sprott Asset Management. US refined copper imports have risen 16-fold since 2015 while domestic production slipped 20%, according to the US Geological Survey, and the country has only two operating smelters, owned by Freeport and Rio Tinto.
World mine production fell 1.1% in the first half of 2026, according to the International Copper Study Group, with Chile down 6.6%, Indonesian concentrate output down 32% while Grasberg remains constrained and the DRC’s concentrate production off 34% after the seismic damage at Kamoa-Kakula.
Morgan Stanley, which began the year expecting mine supply to grow, now sees it flat to slightly lower, which would make 2026 the first year of falling mine output since 2017, the consequence of investment cuts a decade ago and a project pipeline that analyst Amy Gower says is unlikely to add much before 2030. Collahuasi restarting its mothballed leaching plant for 6,000 tonnes of cathode a year is the scale of response high prices are drawing so far.
Precious metal pressured
Silver’s 5.5% drop is its worst session since June and leaves the metal 6% below where it ended a 20% surge inside three weeks in August. The metal is down 9% in 2026 after touching $121.64 in January
The gold miners were spared the worst. Newmont fell less than 2% holding its value at $132 billion, while Agnico Eagle slipped nearly 3% enough to nudge it below, the threshold it has straddled all month. Equinox Gold and AngloGold Ashanti led the gold group lower with 4% declines matching declines at Kinross Gold and Pan American Silver. The royalty and streaming companies also succumbed to the weakness.
Gold has been pinned in a range either side of $4,400 for most of September as traders weigh the Fed outlook, after surging about 10% in August on the so-called debasement trade, the view that efforts to hold down US borrowing costs in the face of swollen deficits would gradually erode the value of the dollar. That trade took a knock on Wednesday when the Treasury announced plans to buy back up to $6 billion of longer-dated debt, well short of what markets had hoped for, and long bonds kept selling off.
“We would expect a September hike to generate a knee-jerk correction, but not to derail the broader recovery,” UBS strategist Joni Teves wrote in a note cited by Bloomberg. “A hold would likely deliver a stronger upside response.” Renisha Chainani, chief research officer at Mumbai bullion trader Augmont Enterprises, expects gold to trade between $4,300 and $4,500 for now, “favoring a buy-the-dip, sell-the-rally approach.”
Thursday’s drop leaves copper up 16% in 2026 and about 5% below Wednesday’s record settlement, while gold is up 2% for the year and 19% below its January record close of $5,419.
(With files from Reuters and Bloomberg)
