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😱 Copper shock
Will new tariffs heat up inflation?

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Welcome back. We’re only midway through the week, but all the tariff updates are already giving us whiplash. Casey breaks it all down in today’s edition.
Plus, Ben relays thoughts on tokenized equities from Franklin Templeton’s innovation head. Check it out:
Is Dr. Copper making a comeback?
It’s July 9. The 90-day pause on most of President Trump’s reciprocal tariffs was supposed to end today, but the start date has once again been pushed back. Color me surprised.
The White House now says most countries have until Aug. 1 to secure trade agreements, or else the new levies go into effect. For real this time.
Investors seem decently optimistic that deals will materialize. Markets were modestly in the green this afternoon, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite up 0.3% and 0.6%, respectively, at 2 pm ET. BTC was similarly flat, up 0.1% at that time.
To recap the current tariff situation: Trump posted copies of letters he sent to 14 countries — including Japan and South Korea — on Monday. He said that seven more letters should go out today.
During yesterday’s cabinet meeting, Trump also revealed a new tariff on copper of 50%. The president did not specify when, exactly, this rate will go into effect.
US copper prices had already been on the rise on expectations of higher levies, but Tuesday’s announcement sent premiums to new highs. The US price premium over the global benchmark reached 138% yesterday.
US copper prices closed Tuesday 13% higher, the largest single-day increase in decades.
We wrote about copper in the lead-up to Liberation Day as analysts speculated about what new tariffs could mean for metal markets.
A reminder that the US currently produces about half the amount of copper it consumes annually — meaning around 1 million metric tons are imported, according to the US Geological Survey. Copper is in virtually everything: wiring, plumbing, motors, medical devices, personal electronics, you name it.
The tariffs have so far had a limited impact on inflation, and there are a few theories as to why. First, companies were expecting tariffs, so it’s likely they increased inventories to prepare (in which case they have not had to raise prices for consumers yet). Many sectors have also experienced lower demand, making price increases less likely.
That said, I think we could see a bigger impact on consumer prices from these copper tariffs. Domestic copper production has remained relatively steady over the past few years. Glencore, a top international producer, expects global demand for the metal to rise going forward.
The problem with bringing production onshore is that it’s a slow process. It takes on average about 18 years for a copper mine to move from discovery to production, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. That’s assuming rich deposits are found in the first place.
We’ll be keeping an eye on metal markets and how they’re impacting equities and crypto assets. Stay tuned.
— Casey Wagner
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The number of 2025 “bold predictions” asset manager Bitwise has gotten right so far this year.
A prediction we’re still waiting for a verdict on: Tokenized real-world assets (excluding stablecoins) will hit $50 billion. We bring it up as this relates to Ben’s section below. We’re at about $25 billion right now, rwa.xyz data shows.

My full Q&A with Franklin Templeton innovation head Sandy Kaul is now live.
Fun fact: She’s among the speakers set to be at Blockworks’ DAS London in October. The institutional presence at those events is always pretty staggering.
But back to the present. Though I touched on pieces of my chat with Kaul last week, I wanted to mention her thoughts on tokenized equities — a topic gaining more attention as Dinari, Kraken and Robinhood share announcements.
Just this morning, Kraken said eligible clients will soon be able to deposit and withdraw xStocks from its platform via the BNB Chain (it started on Solana).
Efforts to offer tokenized exposure to stocks are going to be an important “opening act,” Kaul told me — to pressure regulators to further clarify how to move RWAs into a wallet-based ecosystem in a compliant way.
They’ll help make the business case that there’s demand for these assets in a tokenized form, and she applauds the innovation. But they are “workarounds” in her view.
A reminder that xStocks — tokenized representations of stocks and ETFs — are only available to non-US retail clients in certain countries. They’re backed 1:1 by the underlying equity and issued onchain as tokens (SPL, BEP-20, etc.).
While xStocks offer price exposure to the underlying asset, they don’t carry the same rights (i.e. shareholder voting) as the actual security itself. My colleague Donovan Choy shared some thoughts on this last week.
Robinhood notes about buying its stock tokens: “You are not buying the actual stocks — you are buying tokenized contracts that follow their price, recorded on a blockchain.”
Regulatory questions around tokenized equities remain, and SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce shared a statement today about some things to consider.
An issuer can tokenize its own security. Or a third party issues a token on a security it holds.
Bottom line from @HesterPeirce: "Tokenized securities are still securities."
Her "come meet with the SEC" suggestion as this space evolves has a different tone than Gensler's ...
— Ben Strack 🟪 (@strack_ben)
5:49 PM • Jul 9, 2025
“I’m very excited and enthusiastic about where we’re headed,” Kaul said about the outlook for tokenized equities. “I just don’t think this is the ultimate solution, and it’s a little bit convoluted the way people are being forced…to create that exposure. There will be lots of room to improve that over time.”
— Ben Strack