THE price of copper on the London Metal Exchange (LME) has continued to rise and on Monday posted an increase of US$144 to trade at US$6,504 a tonne, according to Cavmont Bank Zambia daily market report. At LME copper stockpile has dropped to a five-year low of 124,450 tons, less than half the 380,000 tons held in February which has put the metal on track for a price rise. And Bloomberg has reported that the copper decline was a feature of a briefing delivered to investors last week by Ivan Glasenberg, chief executive officer of the big commodity trading and mining company. Cavmont has further reported a marginal rise of US $4.00 in the price of gold and the precious metal was currently trading at US $1,295 an ounce. The same price trajectory was reported for Brent crude oil which went by US $0.45 and the commodity was presently selling at US$68.32 a barrel. On foreign exchange news, the bank reported that the Kwacha was unchanged against the U.S dollar on Monday as it continued trading at K12.100 / K12.150 on the interbank bid and offer respectively. Market activity was mostly flat during the session as most importers were still anticipating a rally in the local unit on the backdrop of expected tax conversions. Elsewhere in the other emerging markets, the South African Rand (ZAR) rallied against the U.S dollar by 2% to intra-day high of $1/ZAR14.1575 following a delayed rating review by Moody’s Current trends indicate that the local unit is likely to remain range bound should there be no change in the current status quo. On money markets, Cavmont bank reported that commercial banks’ aggregate current account increased by K271.69 million to K2, 240.48 million while the overnight borrowing and lending rate decreased by 0.01% to 9.91%.
Total funds traded on Interbank stood at K280 million.
