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The price of aluminum—which has already been surging in 2021—has soared in response to the military coup in Guinea since the country is a major world supplier of bauxite, which is critical in producing the metal.
“Miners now have little other option than to sit tight and await further clarity from the transitional authorities,” Eric Humphrey-Smith, an analyst at risk intelligence company Verisk Maplecroft, told investors last week, according to CNN.
The metal’s price last Tuesday rose to $2,768 a metric ton, which marked a 10-year high, according to The Wall Street Journal. The report pointed out that shares in mining companies and producers of the metal rose on the news. Russia’s United Co. Rusal PLC was up 14 percent last week.
The junta took control of the country on Saturday and arrested the president, Alpha Condé, whom they accused of widespread corruption. The junta swiftly suspended the constitution and sealed off the country’s borders, which were later reopened, according to DW.com. The African Union, in response, said it will suspend the country from the bloc, despite it being a founding member.
Officers from an elite special forces team staged the coup and then appeared on state television announcing that they were in control, the Journal reported.
“The dignity of the population has been flouted for 10 years since our now ex-president [was] in power,” Col. Mamady Douombouya, the special forces chief, said. “What’s happening is a correction of it all.”
The paper pointed out that France, which was the former colonial power, called for Condé’s release. But in November, French President Emmanuel Macron accused the leader of altering the country’s constitution to remain in power.
“President Condé has had a career as an opponent which would have justified organizing a good alternation on his own. And obviously organized the referendum and constitutional change just to be able to keep power,” Macron said in an interview at the time.
Condé used his military to force through amendments to the constitution that would keep him in power until 2032. The Journal said he would have been 94.
The Journal reported that Conakry exported 82.4 million tons of bauxite last year, which was more than any other country. It provides half of China’s bauxite imports, the report said.
“Guinea’s [coup] is expected to add further supply pressures to the aluminum market, although new Chinese supply in the pipeline is anticipated to soften prices,” one analyst told the paper.
TREND FORECAST: Besides noting this article to illustrate the trend that there will be social unrest, coups, civil wars and regional wars as economic conditions rapidly disintegrate… the rising price of aluminum is yet another hard fact of rising inflation.
And, despite U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell telling Congress back in February that inflation was “soft,” and claiming over and over that it is temporary, a half year later inflation keeps spiking far beyond government and Wall Street estimates. Yet, despite the hard numbers, their failed economic forecasts are ignored by the mainstream Presstitutes who get paid to put out by their corporate pimps and government whore masters.