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Anyone else noticed how precious metals have tripled in the last 6 years and base metals have basically remained the same? Am i wrong to think that copper should be at $12 per pound right now and aluminum should be at $3, because these metals have not seen the readjustment to prices yet?
yeah I guess looking at it that way it does seem strange but copper isn't a precious metal and there's lots of it,
most of what's been mined is still out there and can cycle for thousands of years.
knock down a sky scraper and you get back the copper, steel, alloy ect, build a new one today with less.
we will aventually be wireless completely, no need for as much copper, i've done about 300 tv's that would of went into landfill,
that's copper going back into circulation that otherwise wouldn't of.
when silver goes to $400oz and gold $8000oz copper will still be under $5lb
the forums will be inundated with the sad and sorry stories of scrappers that sold their cpu's and ram for beer money,
the hoarders will be posting up pic's of their giant cpu stacks and will be the envy of all, the refiners will be gobsmacked at the
knowledge that all them gold fingers they refined and sold for wads of US$ only to find the US$ is no longer worth anything,
they will end up picking up vacuum cleaners again and the smart scrappers that held their cpu's will rule the world.
right now im leaning to the gold scrap hoarding paying off more in the long run than copper, industrial demand for copper has been declining years pex piping and like you said fiber and wireless tech is taking over, i see demand for aluminum to go up as they put more of it into cars to cut weight
The newest airliners are being made out of composites and some aluminum (used to be all aluminum). Copper is being recycled like mad, some things that used to be made using copper are now using other cheaper materials, and construction of new homes has pretty much stopped.
Gold, Silver, and Platinum are being purchased as a hedge to inflation (and because there is nothing new worth investing in long term). As a few have noticed in this forum the ewaste gold rush will not last forever, most of the boards and chips with any measurable gold have been recycled or hoarded. New motherboards have much less copper content and there is a trend to smaller devices (desktops to notebooks to tablets to eventually just phones) for the masses means less to recycle and lower scrap prices.
I don't see any major gains like the last 5 years for gold or silver coming, they pretty much peaked. Lots of people are going to get stuck taking a loss and not because the economy will improve but because everyone has too much debt and they need to eat so their gold will eventually need to be sold.