Criminal gangs are ripping copper out of US cities. China is taking it everywhere else.

This is a transcript, for the video here:

Bullets:

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Professional gangs are targeting key infrastructure in American cities, stealing copper and metals from street lights, telecommunications systems, bridges, and even statues and cemeteries.

Copper is in critically short supply, and new tariffs are pushing prices in US markets to record highs.

But China is the world’s top consumer of copper, and prices are up only slightly on the year.

China has strongly diversified its supply chain of metals from resource-rich producers in South America, Africa, and elsewhere in Asia.

Over the past decade, Chinese firms have invested hundreds of billions of dollars to secure reliable sources of raw materials, and build comprehensive logistics systems. As a result, Chinese markets are well supplied.

Report:

Good morning. This feature in the New York Times reads like what happens in a third-world nation, in a failed state. Some of the richest cities in the United States are being stripped bare of copper, and infrastructure is failing. In LA, the lights are out across dozens of blocks, and on the Sixth Street Bridge and on the 405. Almost 300 fire hydrants have been stolen, just this year. In just one district near downtown, there were over 6,000 incidents of copper wire theft last year, more than ten times five years ago–and 600 was bad enough.

Sophisticated criminal enterprises are recruiting drug addicts to steal copper across the city, wherever it is. Now there are huge sections of Los Angeles with no lights, and their officials there are taking statues down and locking them up. Up the coast, cemeteries are being robbed.

St. Paul is the capital of Minnesota, same problem there. The light poles are easily broken into and the wire stripped out. The mayor says he notices the problem every time he goes out at night, and complains that as soon as they’re repaired, the baddies come back and rip them out again. Now their pedestrians are getting killed.

Denver is the capital of Colorado, thieves there stole some bronze off the MLK memorial, causing $85,000 in damage. The metal was worth $400. Bronze is copper, an alloy of copper and tin. In Las Vegas: 184 miles of wiring stolen from streetlights there in the past two years.

It’s happening all across the country, and it’s causing big, expensive problems for just tiny amounts of money. They’re only getting pennies on the dollar from scrap yards, while costing cities millions to fix and creating hazards to public safety. Nobody can remember a time when our bridges, telecom cables and fire hydrants have been targeted at such a large scale.

The problem is a severe shortage of copper. Copper is important in everything, and we don’t have nearly enough of it. Globally there will be a shortage of 10 million tons of copper in coming years. Copper prices in the United States are at record highs, and probably going higher still. Trump announced a 50% tariffs on copper imports that will kick in on 1 August. Prices went up 13% in a single day, which was the biggest one-day jump in 57 years.

Manufacturing executives were already concerned, and now they’re panicking. Copper inventories are running low, existing supply contracts at previous, lower prices have just a few weeks to go, and the only thing everyone is sure of now is that copper prices will be a lot higher from now on. Imported copper is 53% of US demand.

Nobody knows what the rules are anymore. Suppliers to Daimler North America are declaring force majeure to raise prices on existing contracts, because of tariffs.

This is a strange thing, though, that copper prices are hitting records in US markets, with shortages so bad that drug addicts are ripping down statues and light poles, but in other markets it’s not nearly as big a problem. This is a chart of copper futures in the United States. There was a big drop in April of this year, then a big bounce back, then the huge move up in early July.

This chart is copper in China, though, and shows the percentage move since the April low. Chinese copper prices are up just 2.8% since the bottom in April. Prices here did spike, briefly, over a 10-day period beginning on 23 June, but since are way off those highs. We don’t want to assume much looking at charts, but copper prices in China MAY BE—could be—saying that the high tariffs in US markets will mean that more copper will be available everywhere else. Could be that.

Here is a song we know by heart. The United States uses more of everything that we’re able to make for ourselves, and there’s no fix to that anytime soon. We need copper for everything—construction, electronics, transportation, consumer and general, industrial equipment—and we’ve just learned about problems of street lights and bridges. There is some good news on the mining side—capacity has gone up since 2000. But refinery capacity is down. That means that the US exports copper ores and concentrates, sends that out to be refined abroad, and imports the refined and finished copper products. Much of that refining takes place in Canada. South Korea, Germany, Peru and Mexico are also high on that list, of exporters of refined copper to the American market. China was the 16th-largest source, at just over 1%. And it’s that part that has analysts confused. China is dominant for copper smelting and refining, but almost all of that is for their domestic market, and for Chinese manufacturers. So the new tariffs on copper won’t impact Chinese industry negatively at all. They will instead hurt manufacturers in the United States, and their suppliers.

The ready answer to that is that we need to open more new mines and refineries in the United States, and these high tariffs will push investors to deploy billions of dollars to open new sources of supply. But it takes an average of 29 years to open a mine in the US. It takes seven to ten years just to get the permits approved, and investors know that won’t happen until after this presidential administration is gone, and the next one besides. The US also has more lawyers than the rest of the world combined, and it’s a lot more profitable for a lot less effort just to file lawsuits to stop new projects, or get companies to pay lots of money to have nuisance suits go away. There’s never an end to that. Resolution Copper in Arizona could theoretically meet a fourth of American copper demand, but can’t get a permit after twelve years of trying.

So we have no choice but to import. Here are the global copper producers for 2023, by country. China is its own market. Indonesia and Kazakhstan have very close ties to China. Chile, Peru, and the DRC are huge copper producers, so one approach may be to develop strong relationships with copper producers in those countries, and invest in their industries, so that we can be well supplied with copper in our markets.

That is a great idea, and it’s one that China already thought of a long time ago. This is what their Belt and Road Initiative was all about: investing hundreds of billions of dollars into resource-rich countries across the world, develop strong relationships, and invest in their industries. Congo sends most of their copper to China, after massive Chinese investments in Africa. China also heavily invested in the smelting of copper in the DRC, so the local industry there can keep more value-added profits in-country.

We should probably forget about Peru, too. Some of the biggest mines in Peru are co-owned or co-operated by Chinese companies, and Peru just opened one of the largest deep-water ports in the world, using loans from Chinese banks. It cost $3.5 billion, will transform global trade and will reach deep into other areas of South America, and will shorten logistics chains for industries there. The takeaway here is that this map doesn’t tell even half the story. Peru is a giant copper producer. So is the DRC. But none of that copper is coming our way, for now and maybe forever. Copper prices head higher in American markets because we don’t have nearly enough, and they go up a lot when new tariffs mean that the copper our companies do come by is going to be a lot more expensive. Everywhere else, it’s just business as usual.

This is Yangshuo, in Guangxi. Be Good.

Resources and links:

China builds $3.5 billion mega-port in Peru; US responds offering 40-year-old trains

https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2024/11/21/china-builds-port-peru-us-old-trains/

Chancay port opens as China’s gateway to South America

https://www.aiddata.org/blog/chancay-port-opens-as-chinas-gateway-to-south-america

Bloomberg, Trump’s 50% Copper Import Tariff Said to Cover Refined Metal

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-11/trump-s-50-copper-import-tariff-said-to-include-refined-metal

Visualizing Copper Production by Country in 2023

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-copper-production-by-country-in-2023/

Copper Tariffs Are the New Steel Tariffs

https://www.cato.org/blog/copper-tariffs-are-new-steel-tariffs