Good evening and welcome to Markets Desk, your close of day read on what moved markets and why.
Copper is catching a bid again, and the driver is familiar — artificial intelligence infrastructure. Data centers are voracious consumers of copper wiring and cooling systems, and as hyperscaler buildouts accelerate, the metal is finding renewed institutional interest. For investors, the question isn't whether demand is real — it's how to get clean exposure without chasing.
Shifting from commodities to energy, oil prices remain stubbornly range-bound, and the reason isn't supply disruption or geopolitical calm — it's structural demand erosion. The world is simply consuming less oil than it once did, a shift driven by electrification, efficiency gains, and slowing industrial growth in China. That's not a trading story. That's a decade-long thesis quietly arriving ahead of schedule.
And on the labor side, the godfather of AI is now aligning with Musk and Gates on one uncomfortable conclusion — mass unemployment is a credible outcome, not a fringe prediction. Geoffrey Hinton's warning carries particular weight because he spent his career building the systems he now says could displace a generation of workers. Markets haven't priced that social disruption, but policymakers eventually will have to.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
