Nickel

London Metals Exchange Building
It's the one with the wavy front and the oval-ish top floor

Bayou Renaissance Man reports on the fallout from the London Metals Exchange disaster that happened earlier this year. It's an entertaining story.

Turns out the London Metals Exchange is actually in London, not Hong Kong. It is owned by some outfit in Hong Kong which is where my confusion originated. The field in back of the building belongs to the Honorable Artillery Company and was originally used for archery. Now it is also used for cricket.

Dudinka - Norilsk

Norilsk, Russia

A big Chinese nickel producer got caught in a short squeeze that severely disrupted the London Metals Exchange (otherwise known as LME) which, for some reason, is based in Hong Kong. They were trying to make some money by gambling, a time honored tradition amongst gamblers and financial whiz kids. They were betting that the price of nickel was going to drop, but then Russia invaded Ukraine, the US threw up a bunch of sanctions and the price of nickel skyrocketed because, don't you know, Russia is one of the biggest producers of nickel in the world.

Nornickel's Bystrinsky Mine and Concentrator

Rising prices are very bad for someone who is betting that the price is going down, especially when the time for settling the bet is coming due, so they tried to buy up a bunch of nickel to cover their bets, which drove the price up even higher and eventually the London Metals Exchange said this is crazy and shut down all nickel trading. It looks like the Chinese producer is going to be out $8 billion which is no small amount, even for a Chinese oligarch.

Norilsk - Dudinka Railway

Norilsk is the site of Russia's biggest nickel mining and smelting operation. It is pretty well landlocked, so their product is shipped to 50 miles to Dudinka where it is loaded onto ships on the Yenisei River.

Arctic Express loading at Dudinka, Russia

Dudinka is 1.5 degrees north of the Arctic Circle, so the Yenisei River is a river of ice, which makes shipping a challenge, to put it mildly.

Liebherr crane unloads the massive heat exchanger from the ship in Dudinka Seaport

Marine Traffic near Norilsk, Russia

All those colored dots on this map are big ships. Norilsk is near the right hand edge of the map and the green dot about a half of an inch to the left is at Dudinka. Left of center in the image is another river of ice but it has quite a bit more traffic. I wonder what they are doing over there. I imagine more resource extraction, but that's going to have to wait for another time.

MV Federal Yamaska Bulk Carrier
198 piece jigsaw puzzle

I did this puzzle a couple of days ago and I wondered where the photo was taken. Didn't find anything, I suspect it's in Alaska, but who knows. I'm tacking it on here just because it seems to fit.

Russian Metal

Explaining Commodities (Scene)

Mish Talk headline: Citigroup Takes Delivery Of 100,000 Tons Of Aluminum And 40,000 Tons Of Zinc

When you are speculating on commodities (like coffee, tea, or aluminum, or orange juice like in Trading Places) the idea is unload your purchase onto someone who actually wants it rather than to take possession of it, because then you would need some place to put it. Evidently Citigroup has leased some warehouse space in Taiwan to store these ingots, so they are jumping in with both feet. Okay, that's fine by me. I ain't playing on the London Metals Exchange.

But then we have this line from Mish:

Much if not most of these metals are of Russia origin. But that’s OK because the Biden administration placed no bans on Russian aluminum or zinc.

So evidently Russia is not the devil incarnate, they are only bad if they sell cheap gas and oil to Europe.