In New York, the COMEX July contract dropped 8.55 cents or 2.5 percent to settle at $3.2850 per lb on Friday, near the bottom of its $3.2635 to $3.3685 session range. COMEX copper volumes tipped 89,000 lots in late New York business, 20 percent above the 30-day norm, according to preliminary Thomson Reuters data.
Copper initially rose after China on Thursday cut rates for the first time since the depths of the financial crisis. But the timing of Beijing's announcement, after markets in Asia closed on Thursday and ahead of a slew of May data releases over this weekend that includes industrial production, trade balance, and inflation figures, triggered some concern that the economic numbers be worse than expected.
"The glass half-empty part of it is that their economy is slowing quite a bit more rapidly than people had expected," said Peter Buchanan, commodities analyst and senior economist at CIBC in Toronto. "But the silver lining could be that the consensus is looking for a 2 percent deceleration in their CPI ... If we get a good inflation number, that could lead some people to believe that there's further stimulus measures in the works."
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