I've come to the conclusion that most of our commodity prices are not fluctuating "organically". This is not a case of supply and demand for the most part. Someone is manipulating them somehow. Copper prices have been going up since at least 1960 when it was .29/#. There was a huge leap up around in ~2002 when the Chinese decided to build huge cities that no one moved into; once that failed attempt was over, copper plummeted then started climbing back up. For the past 10yrs it has a trendline of dropping slowly. I make my living exploring for metals and the prices often just cannot be figured out using a supply/demand system. What's going on with precious metals these days makes no sense at all on a supply/demand system, especially if you include the stock markets in your observations. Everyone in the mining industry is shaking their heads in disbelief and stumbling to explain any of it logically, and none of their explanations make any sense at all, which throws a serious monkey wrench into any exploration and development plans a mining company is trying to put together. It all stinks of manipulation. There are charts like this one below for all the metals and for crude oil for anyone interested.
https://www.macrotrends.net/1476/cop...cal-chart-data