After at least three years downturn for commodities and especially base metals a very painful period for the industry seems to come to an end. During this year's London Metal Exchange (LME) conference, the traditional annual LME Week, bankers, top miners and traders began to believe that the worst is over. They were especially upbeat for zinc, nickel and aluminium where prices have risen steeply already in the three month running up to the London event: zinc plus 54 percent, nickel plus 21 percent and aluminium plus 16 percent. But copper, on the other hand, was trading on record lows, having managed only a modest rise of four percent. Until Donald Trump had won the most bruising Election Campaign ever and became the United States of America's President Elect, copper was the only metal lacking any lustre. Even the International Copper Study Group (ICSG) expects the copper market to move into a surplus in 2017 - for the first time in eight years - and the Consultancy CRU forecasts a surplus of 421,000 tonnes of copper. In spite of that gloomy forecast, Trump's victory has given a straight shot in the arm for the red metal - often called Dr. Copper and seen as the bell-weather of base or industrial metals.
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