Week 11 Wrap: US Commerce chief says Trump ‘emotional’; ASX200 avoids “technical” correction & Congo’s cobalt surge

Jonathon Davidson
jonathon.davidson@themarketonline.com.au

14 March 2025 14:34 (AEDT)

The end of another week – one which has been a bit of a shitshow. The good news is we’re not in a correction in the Oxford sense of the term.

An upward bump in iron ore prices on the Singapore benchmark on Friday to US$103/tn helped the ASX200 narrowly avoid a technical correction in Week 11.

But if it walks like a duck, and looks like a duck, well.

How long ‘til fatigue?

Perhaps the big thing to note is we were at 8,500pts on the XJO not that long ago.

Such lofty heights now appear out of reach for a while, and it is the love-him-or-hate-him Donald Trump at the head of this fall, given intense market uncertainty driven by tariff talks.

Eventually, the market will get tired of these headlines, and they’ll stop proving to be macro catalysts. But in the early days of this Trump 2.0 administration, that fatigue could take quite a while to build up.

Politically at home, Peter Dutton’s renewed focus of late on insurance companies might find some traction after reports the price of flood insurance in parts of QLD has tripled, right after devastating floods.

WA Labor won that state’s election, surprising nobody, but whether or not that spells an ALP victory at the Federal level remains to be seen. WA has hardly any of the national population, after all (though far more than Darwin, at least.)

Turning to tariffs

Let’s get back to tariffs.

If you’re finding it hard to keep up, don’t worry, you’re not alone. In fact, the most recent release of the Beige Book from the USA – a nationwide report that comes out eight times a year from all Federal Reserve state banks in the US – used the word “uncertainty” around 45 times.

So don’t feel alone. Nobody can figure out what’s going on right now. Whether or not Trump is trying to tank the USD to make onshoring in the USA more viable remains to be seen but it’s an idea I’m becoming seduced by, which I talked about in this week’s HotCopper Market Watch podcast.

Of course, that could be me telling myself what I want to hear. The other alternative is Donnie hasn’t got a plan at all, and that’s a bit more worrying.

(US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick gave an interview to Bloomberg on Thursday evening our time when he described Trump’s ‘emotional’ way of doing things. He wouldn’t be drawn on further questions.)

The big C’s: Copper and cobalt surge

In commodities not too much happened this week though it’s worth flagging two things.

First: the US appears set to introduce tariffs on copper. In fact, to that end, the country of Peru is currently preparing a delegation to travel to the States in a bid to persuade the US to exempt the orange metal, at least as far as Peru is involved.

The success of this delegation will be closely watched by counterpart countries throughout Latin America, to be sure.

But it’s not just Trump who can shake up global markets – something which perhaps might be refreshing after the last month and a half.

So it was that when the Democratic Republic of the Congo moved to ban cobalt exports this week, the price of the critical and tech metal took off. Cobalt prices are up +30% over the last week and +55% over the last month.

Speaking of critical minerals, let’s touch back on home soil to end up this wrap – Canberra this week suggested to the US we could take our sovereign critical minerals ambitions to the doorsteps of other countries. We stopped short, of course, of threatening tariffs of our own.