LME suspends nickel trade after prices soar past $100,000 a tonne

The London Metal Exchange (LME) was forced to halt trading in nickel and said it would cancel trades as prices doubled to more than $100,000 per tonne on Tuesday, a surge sources blamed on short covering by one of the world’s top producers.
 

Also, the price of gold in international market shot up more than 3 per cent and the bullion was trading at $2,062.71 an ounce at 8.40 pm IST.
 

The trading shutdown after Western sanctions threatened supply from major producer Russia is the biggest crisis to hit the 145-year-old exchange in decades.
 

In the 1990s a rogue Sumitomo trader tried to corner the copper market and tin trading was stopped for five years in the 1980s.

The LME move came amid market panic caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with buyers scrambling for the metal crucial for making stainless steel and electric vehicle batteries.
 

Investors, meanwhile, are flooding commodity exchange-traded funds with cash on signs that shortages for energy, metals and grains will spark hefty returns.
 

Commodity ETFs were injected with more than $4.5 billion last week, an inflow that would normally be seen over the course of a month.    The money going into the funds topped flows into equity and bond ETFs, which pulled in $3.8 billion and $2.3 billion, respectively.