Copper hits an all-time high of $14,858.50 a tonne

Copper set a fresh record on the London Metal Exchange on 10 September 2026, with three-month futures touching $14,858.50 a tonne, taking the metal's gain for 2026 to around 19% and its rise over the preceding twelve months to roughly 48%. In New York, Comex copper futures settled at $6.89 a pound, also their highest level on record.

The record capped a rally that had been building for weeks on anticipation that Washington would extend its existing tariff regime to cover refined copper imports directly, prompting a wave of shipments into the United States that thinned supply available to buyers elsewhere. Traders and analysts described the dynamic as a genuine physical squeeze layered on top of the trade-policy uncertainty, rather than purely speculative positioning.

A price with two audiences

For the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia, the two dominant African copper producers, a record international price translated directly into higher export revenue and government royalty receipts, even though neither country's copper flows through the tariff-affected US trade lane in large volumes. The price effect, in other words, reached African producers well before, and largely independently of, the specific tariff decision that was driving it.

A rally that soon showed cracks

The record did not hold for long. Reports soon emerged that the White House was reconsidering whether to proceed with a tariff on refined copper at all, weighing concerns about the higher manufacturing costs a broader tariff would impose on US industry. That reconsideration triggered a sharp pullback in prices from the record highs, a reminder that much of copper's September rally had been built on policy anticipation that could unwind as quickly as it had built up.

Government officials in Lusaka pointed to the record price as vindication of recent efforts to attract new investment into Zambia's Copperbelt, even as they acknowledged that much of the rally's durability depended on a US tariff decision entirely outside African producers' control.

Mining finance specialists said the record price was already reviving investor interest in previously shelved Copperbelt expansion projects, though they cautioned that final investment decisions would likely wait until the US tariff question was resolved one way or the other.

Sources

• Seoul Economic Daily: Copper Hits Record High as U.S. Tariff Fears Drain Global Supply, 10 Sept 2026
• Trading Economics: Copper Hits Fresh All-Time High, 10 Sept 2026

Photo: A landscape in Zambia, one of Africa's two dominant copper-producing nations alongside the Democratic Republic of Congo. BlueSalo, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.