Good News For Chile, Bad News For The US

Copper is looking strong, apparently due in part to China stockpiling it, and this of course augurs well for the Precious Metals, especially silver, as copper "shows the way," which is why it is known as Dr. Copper. As we can see on its 5-year chart, it has already broken out of a Head-and-Shoulders bottom to enter a bull market. Right now it is overbought and has resistance to work its way through, so periods of consolidation are to be expected.

The rising copper price is good news for Chile, as copper is its main export earner, and the Chilean mining industry has been in a nasty slump for the past five to seven years, due to the lower copper and gold prices.

The photo below, taken from a circling Learjet, shows the world's biggest open pit, Chuquicamata, a copper mine near to Calama in northern Chile, owned by state run company Codelco.

The true scale of this open pit is revealed by the following picture which shows an ore truck looking like a toy, driving down among the terraces.

These trucks are 100-ton monsters that burn as much fuel in a day as the average car owner uses in a year.

Photos by Maund.

The rising copper price is the major reason why the Chilean peso has started to strengthen and this week the dollar broke down from a large top area on the dollar/Chilean peso chart, as we can see on its 5-year chart below. While the Chilean peso is hardly one of the most important currencies on the planet, this chart by itself looks very ugly for the dollar, and taken together with other dollar cross rate charts, it suggests that dollar that we are looking for is starting or about to get started.

So – good news for Chile and the metals complex, bad news for the dollar and the US.

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Clive Maund has been president of www.clivemaund.com, a successful resource sector website, since its inception in 2003. He has 30 years' experience in technical analysis and has worked for banks, commodity brokers and stockbrokers in the City of London. He holds a Diploma in Technical Analysis from the UK Society of Technical Analysts.

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