Market Wire

Copper and Brass Mill Prices Are Lagging Copper, Squeezing Fabricator Margins

Copper at $13,552 a tonne and Copper and Brass Mill Prices at 557.2 moved in opposite directions in 2 of the last four months, against a 0.51 correlation across 13 months of shared history. When these two separate, the…

Copper at $13,552 a tonne and Copper and Brass Mill Prices at 557.2 moved in opposite directions in 2 of the last four months, against a 0.51 correlation across 13 months of shared history. When these two separate, the gap lands on fabricators buying cathode and selling mill product.

• Copper: $13,552 a tonne (+0.5% on the month)
• Copper and Brass Mill Prices: 557.2 (-0.4% on the month)

The disagreeing months: March 2026 (Copper down 3.3%, Copper and Brass Mill Prices up 3.3%); June 2026 (Copper up 0.5%, Copper and Brass Mill Prices down 0.4%). Measured on month-over-month percent changes, so a shared trend cannot manufacture the correlation — what has broken is genuine co-movement.

Three explanations fit a gap like this, and they predict different next prints. If the downstream series is simply lagging, it catches up and the spread closes from below. If the downstream market has lost pricing power, the spread closes from above, at the producer's expense. If the composition of what is being bought shifted, the two series are now measuring different baskets and the old correlation is the casualty. Which one is happening shows up first in the next two monthly prints.

Sources: IMF global price via FRED; BLS Producer Price Index.

Published 2026-08-07.